Front Row Center

Montana Public Radio will broadcast live from the 2018 Montana Folk Festival in Butte, MT, July 13-15. Festival Director George Everett stopped by to give a preview of the upcoming music festival.

Despite the name "Folk Festival," the music isn't "a songwriter with a guitar," Everett says. "What that means is music of the people. Traditional music that goes back generations. Bluegrass, blues, cajun, zydeco; the genres stay the same, but we try to have the performers be different to represent those genres every year."

The 2018 Barbershop Harmony Contest and A Cappella Festival is coming to Missoula, May 18-19. The festival features seven choruses and 20 quartets from Montana, Washington and Idaho.

John Rettenmayer, the chairman of the festival joins Michael Marsolek to preview this weekend's a cappella fun.

New artistic director and violin soloist for The String Orchestra of the Rockies Maria Larionoff joins us, along with outgoing artistic director and cellist Fern Glass Boyd, to preview the SOR's May 6 performance, "The Cascades Meet The Rockies."

"I'm thrilled, as is the whole orchestra and the board," Boyd says of Larionoff's arrival. "I know that our audiences will be also thrilled to have her be our new leader and bring more exciting and fantastic things ahead for the orchestra and the Missoula area."

"Political modes of argument and debate have infiltrated all of our spheres," says "On Being" host Krista Tippett. "The way we take up any important subject, even in a community, even in a religious institution, it's very contentious. It's about turning issues into a debate between this extreme and that extreme, it's about competing answers. It's not about what are the questions before us that we all have a stake in. There are some simple things that we can do that are actually very hard because they feel so counter-intuitive because of the set of instincts and reflexes that we've worked up."

Krista Tippett joins us to talk about politics and civility and the upcoming "Repairing Public Discourse" event in Missoula Tuesday night.

Greg Johnson, who has served as artistic director of the Montana Repertory Theatre since 1990, joins Michael Marsolek to talk about the Rep's Opening Night Gala, and their 2018 tour with "On Golden Pond."