The first impression of Anna Ash's These Holy Days album is her distinctive, boldly quirky singing - soulful, pliable, and off-center, comfortable in breathy coos and pointed, high-pitched peaks. The title track features a piercing vibrato that's ethereally visceral, both heavenly and a bit frightening. That's the kind of voice that sounds like a natural extension of personality honed over a lifetime, an idiosyncratic instrument that nobody ever had the heart to constrain or correct.

But in a phone interview this week, Ash - who will be performing at Rozz-Tox on December 16 and recording a Daytrotter.com session the next day- revealed that she only discovered this marvel over the past five years, and she's still exploring it.

"I didn't really even know what my voice sounded like until I was like 19 or 20 years old," she said. " I was very shy about singing as a kid. I was never very good because I was so scared and so nervous."

When the Quad City Symphony unveiled its versions of Mozart and Beethoven at the Adler Theatre on November 3, it stripped away the formalism of the Classical period and replaced it with the sensuality of mid-19th Century Romanticism. That approach by Conductor and Music Director Mark Russell Smith enhanced the literary thread that connected the five movements of Beethoven's "Pastorale," and the orchestra's consistently warm and expressive performance made both composers' music more satisfying.

Even though Mozart's Overture to The Magic Flute and Concerto for Clarinet (both composed in 1791) are paramount examples of Classical form, and Beethoven's 1808 Symphony No. 6 is a harbinger of the early Romantic movement, Smith had the orchestra perform with nuance beyond the scores - applying practices largely developed after these pieces were written.

In the middle of the turbulently self-expressive, politically conflicted, structurally groundbreaking nine symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven is a quiet outlier, a revolutionary work whose only discord is a thunderstorm.

It's hard to believe, but the tumultuous Fifth and the mild-mannered Sixth symphonies were premiered in the same ice-cold Vienna theater on December 22, 1808. Conceptually contrasting pieces, each work taps into a distinctly different aspect of Beethoven's personality. No. 5 is an emphatic example of how he portrayed his life through music - bitterness with Vienna, romantic failures, increasing deafness, and frustration with the music politics of the aristocracy. But Symphony No. 6 ("Pastorale") is devoid of this me-against-the-world battle. The conflict is gone because Beethoven had no conflict with nature. No. 6 is simply an observation and organization of what he called "the feelings of nature" put into music, and it enlarged the possibilities for the symphony as a form.

When Maestro Mark Russel Smith cues the Quad City Symphony to begin the "Pastorale" on November 3 and 4, don't listen for themes of fate, politics, or philosophy; let Beethoven's retreat into nature be your respite for 40 minutes. He points the way in his musical story by titling each movement so we know exactly what it's depicting - a first for a large-scale symphony.

In what is likely a statement of the painfully obvious, Jeff Wichmann said that his new album A?hhhhh!!!!! is "something that, as far as I can tell, no one's ever created before, which is a koto/trumpet album with a lot of electronic blips and bleeps."

And that's not all. "I wanted to create an experimental rock album using the koto and the trumpet, as opposed to recording a koto album" of traditional compositions, Wichmann said in a recent phone interview. "Most koto players just do that. I found that limiting ... ."

Wichmann, a former Quad Citian (and former Reader employee) now based in Chicago, will be headlining the official release show for A?hhhhh!!!!! at Rozz-Tox on October 26, and it's almost certain to be a unique experience. The trumpeter and koto player will be joined by guitarist Jeff Kmieciak (a bandmate in Tenki, which plans to release its final album next year) and, on at least one song, Konrad (the Quad Cities electronic-music artist whose remix of the title track is included on the new record).