The Four Seasons (Vivaldi)

The Four Seasons (Italian: Le quattro stagioni) is a group of four violin concerti by Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi, each of which gives a musical expression to a season of the year. They were written about 1723 and were published in 1725 in Amsterdam, together with eight additional violin concerti, as Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione ("The Contest Between Harmony and Invention").

The Four Seasons is the best known of Vivaldi's works. Unusually for the time, Vivaldi published the concerti with accompanying poems (possibly written by Vivaldi himself) that elucidated what it was about those seasons that his music was intended to evoke. It provides one of the earliest and most-detailed examples of what was later called program music—music with a narrative element.

Vivaldi took great pains to relate his music to the texts of the poems, translating the poetic lines themselves directly into the music on the page. In the middle section of the Spring concerto, where the goatherd sleeps, his barking dog can be marked in the viola section. Other natural occurrences are similarly evoked. Vivaldi separated each concerto into three movements, fast-slow-fast, and likewise each linked sonnet into three sections. His arrangement is as follows:

Spring (company)

Spring is the Australian arm of FremantleMedia Australia and was formed in 2011.

Current Programmes

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Spring (Rachmaninoff)

Spring (Vesna), Op. 20, is a single-movement cantata for baritone, chorus and orchestra, written by Sergei Rachmaninoff in 1902.

The work was finished after the famous Second Piano Concerto. Rachmaninoff intended to revise the cantata's orchestration but never did so.

Programme

The work is based on a poem by Nikolay Nekrasov and describes the return of the Zelyoniy shum, or "green rustle". The poem tells of a husband who, fraught with murderous thoughts towards his unfaithful wife during the winter season, is ultimately freed from his frustration and choler by the return of spring.

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Levels (Meek Mill song)

"Levels" is a song by American rapper Meek Mill, released on July 2, 2013 as the lead single from the Maybach Music Group compilation album, Self Made Vol. 3. The song has since peaked at number 15 on the US Billboard Bubbling Under Hot 100 Singles chart.

Music video

The music video premiered on August 13, 2013, on WorldStarHipHop and was directed by Hype Williams. Fellow American rappers T.I., Rick Ross and Big Sean appear in the video, along with DJ Drama.

Track listing

Chart performance

Release history

References

Airtight's Revenge

Airtight's Revenge is the second studio album by American recording artist Bilal, released September 6, 2010, on independent record label Plug Research. Production for the album took place during 2007 to 2010 and was handled by Bilal, Steve McKie, Nottz, Shafiq Husayn, Conley "Tone" Whitfield, and 88-Keys. The follow-up to his debut album 1st Born Second (2001), it was conceived following the shelving of Bilal's Love for Sale project in 2004 and conflicts with his former label Interscope Records. Airtight's Revenge is a neo soul album with elements of jazz, funk, and psychedelic rock.

The album debuted at number 106 on the US Billboard 200 chart, selling 4,600 copies in its first week. Although it charted modestly, Airtight's Revenge was well received by music critics upon its release. PopMatters ranked the album number 61 in its year-end list of best albums for 2010, calling it a "wildly inventive, wildly enjoyable album".

Background and recording

Bilal worked on the album for three years, according to an interview with The Root in September 2010. Bilal said, of Airtight's Revenge: "The concept beyond this album was really just to write short stories and dark tales of life in general. I used a lot and drew a lot from my own life and my own experiences, but I also took a lot of things from fiction and tried to make certain statements, from a love standpoint."Bilal said that his experiences with his leaked, unreleased album Love For Sale and the ensuing conflict with his then-record label (Interscope) led him to the "dark underworld" storytelling showcased in Airtight's Revenge. The track "Little One" references Bilal's eldest son's autism. The album features Bilal's famous falsetto and Afro-futuristic sound. The album was released earlier in the United Kingdom on September 6, 2010.

Curve of constant width

In geometry, a curve of constant width is a convex planar shape whose width (defined as the perpendicular distance between two distinct parallel lines each having at least one point in common with the shape's boundary but none with the shape's interior) is the same regardless of the orientation of the curve.

More generally, any compact convex planar body D has one pair of parallel supporting lines in any given direction. A supporting line is a line that has at least one point in common with the boundary of D but no points in common with the interior of D. The width of the body is defined as before. If the width of D is the same in all directions, the body is said to have constant width and its boundary is a curve of constant width; the planar body itself is called an orbiform.

The width of a circle is constant: its diameter. On the other hand, the width of a square varies between the length of a side and that of a diagonal, in the ratio . Thus the question arises: if a given shape's width is constant in all directions, is it necessarily a circle? The surprising answer is that there are many non-circular shapes of constant width. A nontrivial example is the Reuleaux triangle. To construct this, take an equilateral triangle with vertices ABC and draw the arc BC on the circle centered at A, the arc CA on the circle centered at B, and the arc AB on the circle centered at C. The resulting figure is of constant width.