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.

Them Som'Bitches

The title of the second track on the Asphalt Plains EP from the Quad Cities-based garage-country band Them Som'Bitches is "D.G.A.F.," with the first three letters standing for "Don't Give a." You can figure out the rest, and it's about that subtle. For good measure, the phrase turns up in the next song, too.

Despite that symptomatic coarseness, the six songs on Asphalt Plains represent a modest achievement, despair and nihilism delivered with a wink and elevated by consistently engaging performance. Over 20 minutes, the band's shit-kicking aesthetic unerringly evokes a very particular picture: for me, aimless folks marking time in a trailer on the scrubland, with no other sign of human activity.

That's nearly explicit in "Buzzard Ridge," with animal-call samples taking the roles of instruments - and doing it well. I particularly like the owl, which appears to think it's a background vocalist, and the howling. These fanciful flourishes all over the EP are a bit on-the-nose, but that's part of their charm; we ain't talking high art.

Even without the sound effects, though, the punks-doing-country songs suggest a dual nature: the barren beauty of the American Southwest invaded by loners with nothing better to do than drink and shoot stuff.

Day Joy

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."

Igor StravinskyWithin seconds of the new ballet's unusual musical beginning - a solo bassoon - the audience began hissing and making comments. As the music burst into unchanging pitches of repeated rhythmic patterns, the curtain opened with strangely costumed dancers stamping their feet in a pigeon-toed position. No traditional tutus and toe shoes here; they wore long-sleeved dresses, headbands, and cross-laced leggings into moccasin-type shoes.

Members of the audience, thinking they were being mocked, started throwing whatever they could grab at the dancers and orchestra. Other audience members tried to stop, or at least restrain, the angry protesters by beating them with canes, hats, and coats, or shouting them down. The uproar became so loud that the dancers were unable to hear the orchestra. Disgusted by the fracas, the composer left his seat for the backstage wings, where the choreographer was calling out the rhythmic counts for the on-stage dancers.

After roughly 40 of the worst offenders were extricated by ushers and management, order was finally restored midway through the performance, and the remainder of the ballet was presented to an attentive though stunned audience.

At the conclusion, the response was mixed: Some were outraged by the raw music and unconventional choreography, but others gave the performers and composer several curtain calls and were intrigued by how, with his music, Igor Stravinsky could resolve the contradiction between a modern symphony orchestra and scenes of ancient tribal rituals. And it was how he solved the problem that changed music history.

It was May 1913, and Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring: Scenes of Pagan Russia was being debuted at the month-old Théâtre des Champs->lysées in Paris. The near-riot was perhaps appropriate for a piece that revolutionized musical thinking, elevated rhythm to its own art form, and stands as arguably the most important composition of the 20th Century. Now, 100 years later, the Quad City Symphony Orchestra will perform The Rite at its March concerts.

Five by Design

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.

Dan Hubbard & the Humadors

The Web-site bio of Dan Hubbard & the Humadors says the band builds its music on "the classic sounds of Tom Petty, Van Morrison, Neil Young, and Jackson Browne." That's a pretty common set of influences, and one that has produced plenty of earnest but dull music in the hands of less-skilled singers/songwriters.

But with Hubbard and his band - playing their first headlining gig in the Quad Cities on February 8 at Rozz-Tox - those forebears mostly hint at an unpretentious, straightforward, gimmick-free, and song-based style. And when the hooks are plentiful and the arrangements are thoughtful and performed with vigor - as they usually are - the guys pull it off.

Nikki HillBased on her vocal confidence and itinerary, it's hard to believe that Nikki Hill is by her own admission a neophyte on the music scene.

She began singing in the church choir in her native North Carolina when she was six or seven, but her tenure as a performing and touring rock-and-roll artist is considerably shorter - basically less than a year. Yet she co-produced and released her self-titled debut EP last year on her own label, she's planning a spring release of some sort, and this spring and summer she'll be playing in Italy, Germany, Sweden, Norway, and Spain. On Saturday, she'll be performing at RIBCO, and while you might not have heard of Hill, she's doing her damnedest to change that.

"I'm kind of in that ride-it-'til-the-wheels-fall-off mode," the 28-year-old said in a phone interview last week.

Rob Cimmarusti working on an audio-equipment installation at Progressive Baptist Church in Davenport on January 4, 2013.

Rob Cimmarusti calls it a "malady" - a gentle label for the cancer he's been told will kill him in the next few months.

But that term is a fair reflection of the attitude the longtime Quad Cities musician, producer, and sound engineer has about the adenocarcinoma that began in his pancreas and has since popped up in the fatty tissue near his abdominal wall. He received his initial cancer diagnosis on February 1 (his 53rd birthday) and has been through chemotherapy, radiation treatments, and surgeries. In an interview last week, he compared the present state of his tumors to a "shotgun blast"; there are too many of them to target with additional surgery or radiation, and because they're in tissues that get relatively little blood, they don't respond well to chemo.

Cimmarusti conceded that his situation is "not good, not hopeful." A few months ago, he said, a doctor in Iowa City told him: "Get your affairs in order. It's going to be a matter of months." His response was to fight: "We're like, 'Well, we're not going to take that.'"

For the seventh year, I've compiled a selection of favorite songs from the past year and sequenced them into an album - something that can fit on an 80-minute CD, with no artists repeated from previous years and a limit of one song per artist.

This year's edition features 20 tracks and is notably heavier and louder than any of the past six. Read nothing more into that than the possibility that my hearing is likely deteriorating now that I'm north of 40. (And don't infer anything from the inclusion of two Swedish bands and another from Denmark, or my apparent weakness for the second songs of albums.)

Beyond the surface aggression, I'm imposing on my 2012 album an air of finality, both aesthetically and thematically. Whether it's the violence promised and delivered by the Hives or the natural calamity of Alexandre Desplat or the seasonal metaphor of Max Richter or the self-loathing regret of Cloud Nothings or the ominous instrumental clouds of Goat, this sounds a bit like the world is ending. I'm pretty sure the planet as we know it will be here on December 22, but here's a soundtrack for December 21 just in case some interpretations of the Mayan calendar prove correct.

The Hives, "My Time Is Coming." There's always been a threatening edge to the punkish garage rock of the Hives, but it's always been obliterated by cheekiness, matching outfits, and a bright bluster that made it impossible to take anything at all seriously. Here, the title and chorus are far from earnest, but both the music and vocals carry something darker - not of getting one's due but of seizing out of desperation and deprivation ("You see I grew up in a hole / Squeezing diamonds out of coal"). The reverb-heavy guitar and the quiet opening before detonation represent minor aesthetic developments for the Swedes, but the biggest change is how they tap into a rage that for once feels authentic.

The Cerny Brothers

I first interviewed the Cerny brothers six years ago, back when Scott and Robert were college students at Northern Illinois University. They were then the electronic-rock duo Planning the Rebellion, and I called their debut album "shockingly mature and assured."

Both of those things still apply, and you can add "ballsy" to mix.

Fronting their four-piece Cerny Brothers band, they'll be performing at the Redstone Room on December 22 as part of a holiday trip to the family home in Sherrard, Illinois.

Based in Los Angeles and playing an aggressive brand of acoustic Americana, Scott (now 24 years old) and Robert (25) brim with both confidence and an understanding of how the music industry works. They have big dreams they went to L.A. to fulfill, but talking to them last week, they weren't deluded about their chances, and they don't expect success to come knocking on their door.

"We've always made music and movies," Scott said of their move to California after college. "We just thought, 'What's the best place we could do both those things?'"

This is not one of those get-a-job-and-try-to-squeeze-in-our-passions-on-the-side things; they're all-in with music. "We don't have a backup plan," Scott said. "Fail or succeed, we have literally one objective": write songs, improve their live show, and "get good enough to a point where people can no longer ignore you. ... We're getting very good at going into a room and turning people who don't care about us into people that care about us."

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