The titles of the first two Masterworks concerts in the Quad City Symphony Orchestra's season indicate a distinct shift - from the pure music of Beethoven 5 (named for the showcase piece) to the literary-themed Poems on Fate.

Concert planners were obviously aiming to demonstrate the symbiotic relationship between language and music in the November concerts. But somewhere between the idea for Poems on Fate and the selection of its music, the conceptual glue lost its cohesion. The audience's perfunctory response at the Adler Theatre on November 5 was in stark relief to the profuse applause and standing ovation that greeted Beethoven 5's first performance, and it was clear that something had gone wrong.

All four pieces in the Poems on Fate program clearly fit the theme. Johannes Brahms' Song of Destiny used text from a poem, Giuseppe Verdi's opera La Forza del Destino a libretto, and Richard Strauss' Death & Transfiguration and Franz Liszt's Les Preludes inspired poems that were included as prefaces in their published scores.

The challenge for program planners was to maintain the integrity of the musical experience while coherently demonstrating its connection to literature. (It would have helped if the prefaces had been included in the printed program, to provide a fuller literary context for the audience but also to demonstrate the florid style characteristic of the period when the music was composed.) And while the literary connections worked, the music, as a program, didn't.

A lot of bands decide to track their albums largely live in the studio, but until I talked to David Mayfield, I'd never heard such a strong rationale. The typical goal (outside of saving money and time) is to capture a live energy, with the incidental benefit of retaining some charming flubs.

But for the self-titled debut of the David Mayfield Parade, this bandleader knew that live tracking - including recording the drums with a single microphone - would get the best out of the players.

"I think there's some merit to limiting your options," said Mayfield, whose band will perform as part of the Communion Tour at Rock Island's Rozz-Tox on November 1. "It really helped to just put us in a mindset of pulling the trigger and making these choices early on. All the lead guitar, and drums, and bass are in the room together, and there's so much bleed that you couldn't go in and fix something. You had to just choose a take and live with it, which kind of made everyone ... more precious about their performance."

In the course of a phone interview last week, Page Hamilton - lead guitarist, singer, and composer for Helmet, performing on October 8 at RIBCO - dropped the names of Beethoven, John Williams, Philip Glass, Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane.

That collection gives a good sense of the breadth of Hamilton's musical study and knowledge, and some indication of why his band rewards close listening. It also hints at why Hamilton's rigorous heavy music has found only modest commercial success, with one gold album (1992's Meantime) and only top-50 peak chart positions in the United States.

What's important to understand is that while there's an essential academic/philosophical component to Helmet's music, the band has also been distinguished by an uncompromising pummeling force, what the All Music Guide described as a "very precise and diabolical din - full of martial barks, jackhammering drums, rumbling bass, and some of the most brilliant IQ-lowering guitar riffs since Black Sabbath's first four albums." Hamilton rejects the assertion that Helmet is simply a metal band, but it operates almost exclusively in an aggressively gritty guitar/bass/drum framework. Within that structure and self-imposed limitations, Hamilton explores musical theory.

"The Helmet vocabulary is the drop-tuning, the chord voicing, and the figure writing, or riff writing," he said. (There are also players employing different time signatures, a technique borrowed from composer Glenn Branca that Hamilton said creates "this sort of forward propulsion.") "It's thematic writing. It's the same approach a jazz improviser would use, or a classical composer." He then mimicked the openings of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 and John Williams' title-crawl theme for Star Wars, and discussed how they quickly establish themes that are then developed. "That's my approach to writing. I'm not stringing a bunch of shit together - the drummer came up with this, and I came up with that. That can work, but I think eventually you run out of ideas. We're all using the same 12 notes in Western music."

If that makes your eyes glaze, it must also be noted that Hamilton's solos - which he said he approaches like a "spaz jazz idiot" - are razor-wire sharp and exhilarating, regardless of a listener's music-theory understanding.

In April 2008, Seattle alternative-weekly paper The Stranger dubbed Shenandoah Davis its artist of the week, writing that "fans of Joanna Newsom have a local act to love." The comparison to the idiosyncratic harpist/singer/songwriter was flattering, but there was one problem: Davis had never played in public as a solo artist.

She began to get inquiries about shows, but she was unseasoned as both a songwriter and performer. "I remember very distinctly that there was one show that I was so nervous about I canceled it maybe half an hour before - the second show I was ever supposed to play," the 26-year-old Davis said in a phone interview promoting her September 16 show at Rozz-Tox.

So started a steep learning curve for Davis, who began playing piano as a toddler and has a degree in opera performance but has been writing her own songs for less than four years.