The second track on the debut album by the Kopecky Family Band is the mid-tempo number "Heartbeat," pleasant but unremarkable until the two-tiered bridge, which ultimately explodes with what sounds like a theremin.

It's actually co-founder Gabe Simon whistling, multitracked and treated with reverb, and those 15 seconds demonstrate a maximalist tendency - understandable for a six-person band with members who play several instruments. The album starts with horns and cello, for instance, before the guitar rock kicks in, and the record employs an expansive sonic palette.

But the key thing about that whistling is that it's right, the perfect touch at the perfect moment. Beyond the typical mix of loud and quiet songs, the Kopecky Family Band on the vibrantly dynamic Kids Raising Kids (out April 2 on ATO Records) has a judiciously sharp sense of how much or little songs require; adventurousness is tempered by discipline.

"Change" is acoustic guitar, some ethereal atmospherics, and vocals - anchored by the inherently poignant singing of Kelsey Kopecky. Straightforward opener "Wandering Eyes" has a swagger bordering on stalker menace. "Are You Listening?" finds Simon whistling again, but in a conventionally tuneful way.

"That's the dynamic of the record: to get that simple or to get as a big as a song like 'Hope' - multiple layers, tons of strings, tons of keyboards ... ," Simon said. "There have to be those moments when you say, 'Does it need everything? ... Can this song survive just by itself? Or does the song need these layers to build it into something great, ... memorable?' That's what I think is cool about the record: It has both of those things. That's what six people allows to happen."

With one foot on the familiar, sturdy dock of 19th Century Romanticism and the other in the precarious boat of innovative and demanding 20th Century Modernism, the Quad City Symphony was able in its March 9 concert to demonstrate diametrically different musical styles without drowning - but not without getting wet.

Without a guest soloist to share the stage and musical load, Music Director and Conductor Mark Russell Smith and the Quad City Symphony showcased two iconic Russian pieces for virtuoso orchestra: Maurice Ravel's orchestration of Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition and Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. Either piece by itself would have been considered a featured work, but together they were a grueling concerto for orchestra that required the musicians to perform as though each was a soloist.

Both compositions are musical depictions of works from other artistic disciplines: The Rite (a piece of Modernism first performed in 1913) accompanied an original story ballet, and Pictures (first composed in the late Romantic style period in 1874) described the subjects of paintings by Viktor Hartmann. Both composers used variations in orchestration, tempo, tonality, and melodic texture to differentiate the subject matter or plot of each painting or dance. But the orchestra struggled with the radically different use of these elements, and as a result the contrast between Romanticism and Modernism wasn't always clearly demonstrated in the performance.

The vibe of Day Joy's debut album is undoubtedly dreamy. The Florida-based band intends that literally - but not quite in the obvious manner of gentle, mild, peaceful sleep.

Yes, it has cool cello, some warm organ, and spare banjo and guitar in wispy, atmospheric, reverb-heavy arrangements. There are lovely harmonies articulating what Michael Serrin - who founded the band with Peter Michael Perceval III - called "soft-spoken melodies." It usually moves at an aimless pace toward no clear destination.

But the opening track, with the appropriate title "Animal Noise," closes with an aggressive cacophony from nature. The next song is "Bone & Bloody," followed by "Talks of Terror" - which teeters on the edge of a climactic cliff but never leaps off, denying a catharsis that had seemed inevitable. The penultimate song is "Splattered Like Me."

Sweet dreams might dominate, in other words, but they're swirled with nightmares.

Day Joy, on its way to South by Southwest later this month, will perform at Rozz-Tox on March 8, and Serrin said in a phone interview that these contradictions were intentional. The tantalizingly titled Go to Sleep, Mess - released in February on Small Plates Records - was crafted as a concept album. "The idea of it was the mental turmoil that you may have when you can't sleep at night," he said, also comparing it to "that contrast between that beautiful dream and that terrible nightmare you have right after it."

We do silly things for love. This must be one of them.

In what Music Director and Conductor Mark Russell Smith termed a "fun experiment" at his February 7 "Inside the Music" lecture, the Quad City Symphony, for its "Valentine's Day" Masterworks concerts, replaced classical-music repertoire for half of the program with tunes from the 1940s sung by a five-member swing group. Last year, we got Scheherazade; this year, we got the "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy."

The orchestra was the opening act, performing Berlioz's arrangement of Carl Maria von Weber's Invitation to the Dance, Leonard Bernstein's Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, and Tchaikovsky's "Waltz" from Swan Lake. During the second half, the orchestra served as backup band for vocal group Five by Design, which performed a variety of old-time pop selections including, among others, "Night & Day," "Begin the Beguine," "The Trolley Song," "Mairzy Doats," and "Sing, Sing, Sing."

I enjoy all kinds of music, and symphony orchestras have long attempted to attract new audiences by blending popular and classical music in their Pops concerts. Simply put, the swing music on the February program belonged in a Pops concert, and it diminished the Quad City Symphony's Masterworks series - whose traditional forms and repertoire are my balms against the temporal superficiality of what Mahler called "a garish world."

The musical mismatch in conception was exacerbated in the February 9 Adler Theatre concert by the artistic disparity between the orchestra and vocal group, both in technical execution and ability to evoke an emotional response. Even judged only in its genre, Five by Design could not match the performance standard of the orchestra.