A bright and youthful concert event featuring works by composers Gioachino Rossini, Felix Mendelssohn, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the Quad City Symphony Orchestra's The Italian Symphony serves as the fourth Masterworks presentation of the musicians' 2020-21 season, with this February 7 celebration of Italy's country and culture boasting a performance by violinist Linda Phan, winner of the 2019 Quad City Symphony Youth Ensembles Concerto Competition.

Davenport-based producer K1ng Supr3m3 breaks out the crates and gathers together a network of dusty samples and fluid drum patterns for ジャンプドライブ (Japanese Katakana for “Jump Drive,” which might lead us to believe that these tracks were sourced from a particularly packed flash USB stick).

A recap of 2020 is unnecessary for this article. We all know what kind of year it was. Its upside was the incredible amount of good music that made its way to the ears of a world that needed to hear it - perhaps more than at any other time in recent history.

Avant-garde composer, multi-instrumentalist, and soft-music pioneer Harold Budd passed away earlier this month at the age of 84. Though considered a major forerunner of styles of music that would come to be named “ambient” and “New Age” in their various forms, Budd rejected these terms outright. From his viewpoint, his music floated in its own stratum, somewhere in the neighborhood of 20th-century minimalism or neoclassical composition.