There's a perfectly practical reason the Kansas-based band Müscle Wörship uses umlauts in its name - to protect people who would rather not know about a particular sexual fetish. So a word of advice to those folks: Don't do an online search for the band without those umlauts!

But the combination of a somewhat-deviant punk-ish name and those metal dots (à la Motörhead) makes musical sense, too, as Müscle Wörship lives in the cracks between styles. There's the lean aggression of punk, the experimental complexity of post-punk, the general heaviness of metal, extensive use of the tremolo bar that sometimes recalls the signature guitar sounds of both My Bloody Valentine and Neil Young, alternative tunings that bring to mind Sonic Youth, a grunge-y emphasis on hooks and distorted melody, and even hints of emo in the vocals.

The magic is that - on Müscle Wörship's self-titled debut album from earlier this year - those disparate elements have been combined in a way that, against all odds, is nearly monolithic: 32 furious minutes of great and nearly great infectious hard rock. (And just to be clear: The whole record is 32 minutes.) The group's music has three very different methods of persuasion - forceful enough to grab you by the throat, accessible enough to suck you in, and intricate enough to get lost in. In that sense, the name is wholly appropriate: This is music that's all beautifully sculpted muscle.

Jennifer Higdon's Violin Concerto unfolds as a slow burn with flickering, firefly-like tones, then straps you into a sonic roller coaster, corkscrewing through ever-changing musical images. When you have experienced the sublime disorderliness of Higdon's concerto, it seems miraculous that it ultimately makes sense; you have experienced something that was perceivable if not completely comprehensible.

The winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Music, Higdon's concerto could be bewildering for audiences at the Quad City Symphony's December 7 and 8 concerts, with its copious, fast-changing variations of instrumental combinations and dynamics: violin harmonics with small finger cymbals, tingling high woodwinds with low, growling cellos and basses, sudden changes in volume, and constantly contrasting textures of sound. The musical events might seem random at first, but somewhere in your brain, you should be able to recognize and reorganize them enough to get a sense of Higdon's complex yet stunningly accessible musical thinking.

With a diverse, rich sampling of chamber music in its second Masterworks concert of the season, the Quad City Symphony on October 26 provided sensitive musical insight into the personal lives of composers. No symphonies, concertos, or philosophical tone poems here; rather the program included instrumental music for the stage, and vocal music about relationships with family and friends. The performance was consistently strong throughout with a strange musical shuffle near the end that almost ruined the warm, cozy atmosphere the musicians worked so hard to create.

To "Concert Conversations" participants sitting in the Adler just before the program, Music Director and Conductor Mark Russell Smith explained that "in the old days, concerts were bookended by big works and filled in with bits and pieces of other works." Franz Schubert's Overture to Rosamunde and Richard Strauss' Suite from Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme might have been the "bookends" of the program, but the soul was found in the "bits and pieces" sung by guest soprano Sarah Shafer.

It likely seems a minor thing, but most of the tracks on Sybarite5's 2012 album Everything in Its Right Place clock in within a few seconds of the corresponding Radiohead versions.

The string quintet - which will have three public performances as part of its Quad City Arts Visiting Artist residency from November 4 though 10 - is by no means the first classically trained ensemble to tackle the songs of Thom Yorke and company. But it's certainly the most faithful, and the song lengths are actually telling.

The eight arrangements by Paul Sanho Kim (on the 10-track album) are striking in matching each song nearly moment-for-moment and part-by-part. This includes lush, thick, slow pieces such as "Everything in Its Right Place" and "Pyramid Song" but also explosive rockers such as "Paranoid Android" and "2+2=5." Crucially, neither the arrangements nor the performances castrate the songs, retaining their dynamic range and energy without drums, electric guitars, or amplification.