In a joint production, Central Pennsylvania Youth Ballet and the Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra will present a new ballet version of Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint-Saens. Performances will be 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. Saturday, October 22, and Sunday, October 23.

A musician who went to college to be a biomedical engineer? "I had a crisis of left-brainedness," says singer/songwriter Meghan Cary as she describes how she came to abandon the sciences eventually to pursue the arts. She moved on to studying theater, performing in shows and doing voiceover work. It wasn't until after her husband, a musician with whom she'd sometimes sing back-up for, passed away that she reached for his guitar as a way to heal.

Her journey through healing and starting again has become the music that many people have come to listen to and love. A native of Hershey, she's bringing her guitar and her stories back to the area at the Stage On Herr Saturday, August 20th at 8:45pm. For more of her music, videos and tour dates, check our her website at www.meghancary.com

Pittsburgh musician Joy Ike has been traveling to DC, Baltimore, New York and now Harrisburg, brandishing her personal blend of soul, folk and pop music. She started playing piano as a kid but abandoned it only to return to music and writing after college. "The more I played and the more I wrote songs," she says, "the more I played out, and the more I played out more people would ask me for cds and albums to take home with them, and one day I quit my job and haven't look back since." Always moving forward, she'll be arriving in Harrisburg Thursday, August 4th at 8pm for a performance at HMAC's Stage on Herr. Listen to the full interview with Joy Ike below.

The guys from Straight No Chaser started singing at college parties as a way to meet girls. Now they sing in front of sold-out audiences to make a living. Their rise to success was a surprise to all of them, prompted years after the group had split up by a video of one of their performances posted to YouTube. Walter Chase and Jerome Collins talk about how they started, how the choose their music and the careers they abandoned to make Straight No Chaser their full-time job.

Paul Brown is an NPR reporter and bluegrass musician. He draws comparisons between his love of old-time bluegrass music and his work as a reporter and talks about how his interest in this style of music developed early on. The Susquehanna Folk Music Society welcomes him to the Harrisburg area on April 16th at 7:30pm at Fort Hunter.