Today's Festival Showcase features guitarist Sharon Isbin with a generous sampling of her different performing styles.We chat about how her meditation practice informs her performances, and talk about her new documentary: Sharon Isbin - Troubador and her live collaboration with mezzo soprano Isabel Leonard. Next, we talk with philanthropist Joan Harris, whose name appears outside Harris Concert Hall. Due to Deborah Voigt's illness, we were not able to carry on with her  interview and instead talked about the Unabashedly Atonal series and the surprisingly beautiful music that appears in it.

Today is Tuesday, July 29th.

A free Spotlight recital takes place at noon today in the Aspen Chapel.

At 1pm, longtime Aspen Music School faculty member Paul Kantor gives a violin master class in Harris Concert Hall.

The American Academy of Conducting at Aspen Orchestra gives a free concert today at 4pm in the Benedict Music Tent, featuring this summer’s conducting students in Beethoven’s Second Symphony and Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration. The Orchestra will also be joined by this summer’s Low Strings Competition winner.

At 7:30pm tonight, the American String Quartet returns to Aspen for a performance of the late Beethoven Quartet in E flat major, op. 127 and the lyrical Piano Quintet in A  by Dvorak with Anton Nel at the piano.

Bears are increasingly being drawn into Aspen this summer as their natural foods up high are late to bloom. Early Sunday a black bear swiped at a woman in a downtown alley. And, the number of bear-related calls to police have spiked in July. Aspen Public Radio’s Marci Krivonen reports.

So far in 2014, the Aspen Police Department has handled 150 calls, from bears digging through garbage to questions about local trash laws. Five callers reported bears breaking into homes. Police Department spokesperson Blair Weyer says so far it’s a moderate year for bear activity.

Rick Bass was born in Fort Worth, Texas in 1958. His father was a geologist who passed on his passion to his son. Bass received a B.S. in petroleum geology at Utah State University in 1979, and then worked as a gas and oil geologist in Jackson, Mississippi. He started writing short stories during his lunch breaks.

He is the author of over twenty books. His first short story collection, The Watch, set in Texas, won the PEN/Nelson Algren Award, and his 2002 collection, The Hermit’s Story, was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. Bass’s stories have also been awarded the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Award and have been collected in The Best American Short Stories. His newest novel is called All The Land To Hold Us.

This summer,  the Anderson Ranch Arts Center is hosting a symposium series - new to the Ranch. Making The Change They Want To See is a symposium taking place August 13th and 14th. Curated by Anne Pasternak, President and Artistic Director of Creative Time in New York City, the symposium is bringing in nine artists who work to combat social injustice. The artists will share how they have used art as a platform for creating change.