The battle lines have been drawn.

For some years now the town of Oak Bluffs has hosted an annual Monster Shark Tournament during a weekend in July. The event is well attended by both fishermen and spectators. But it is also protested regularly.

No accounting for taste. More accurately, those who love classical music enjoy such a variety of musical tastes, that only in the hands of an elite concert group will all be satisfied.

So it was last Saturday at the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown, when the Martha’s Vineyard Chamber Music Society kicked off its pre-summer spring concert with a specially curated piano quartet.

In the spring of 1967, Tom Mills, the high school choral and orchestral director at the time, hand-picked a select group of student singers who began meeting to sing madrigals and sacred music. When thinking of possible names for the group someone floated the idea, Tom Grape and His Bunch. Thankfully, Barbara Lopes, then a freshman in high school, had a better idea: The Minnesingers, in tribute to a performance troupe of “lovers of song” who traveled throughout Germany in the 12th to 14th centuries.

The percussion of daily life for too many Israelis and Palestinians includes the snare of machine gun fire, or the bass of bomb blasts. But Vineyarder Rick Bausman has ventured to the region, first in 2009 and again 2010, with new rhythms to inspire and unite the next generation of Jews, Muslims and Christians. This October he returns for a nine-day drumming bus tour of the region and he wants Islanders to have the first chance to sign up.

A gray mist hung over the Chilmark Tavern last Saturday evening, setting the tone for a unique addition to the weekly Pathway’s program.

Justen Ahren, West Tisbury’s new Poet Laureate, shared some of his newest poems, part of a new manuscript he has compiled. The poems, narrated in two different voices — that of a mother and her son — were inspired by a simple event Mr. Ahren once saw in Florida: a woman standing in a parking lot, arms outstretched, turning in circles.

Last Saturday night at the Chilmark Tavern, Dee Stevens, artistic director of the Martha’s Vineyard Chamber Music Society, and David Stanwood, pianist and inventor of a new system of piano tuning, performed for the Imagine Arts Festival put on by Marianne Goldberg and the Pathways Projects Institute.