The passacaglia (/pæsəˈkɑːliə/; Italian: [pasːaˈkaʎːa]) is a musical form that originated in early seventeenth-century Spain and is still used by contemporary composers. It is usually of a serious character and is often, but not always, based on a bass-ostinato and written in triple metre.

The term passacaglia (Spanish: pasacalle; French: passacaille; Italian: passacaglia, passacaglio, passagallo, passacagli, passacaglie) derives from the Spanish pasar (to walk) and calle (street). It originated in early 17th century Spain as a Spanish: rasgueado (strummed) interlude between instrumentally accompanied dances or songs. Despite the form's Spanish roots (confirmed by references in Spanish literature of the period), the first written examples of passacaglias are found in an Italian source dated 1606. These pieces, as well as others from Italian sources from the beginning of the century, are simple, brief sequences of chords outlining a cadential formula.

Bear McCreary (born 17 February 1979) is an American composer and musician living in Los Angeles, California. He is best known for his work on the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica television series.

McCreary was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and spent most of his formative years in Bellingham, Washington. He is the son of author Laura Kalpakian and professor Jay McCreary of University of Hawaii. He is of Irish and Armenian descent. He studied under the renowned film score composer Elmer Bernstein at the USC Thornton School of Music, during which time he reconstructed and re-orchestrated Bernstein's 1963 score for Kings of the Sun. Their collaboration allowed for the complete score to be available as a soundtrack album for the first time in forty years.

From 1998 until 2005, McCreary built up a body of work scoring short films. McCreary is a pianist and a self-taught accordionist, and plays in the avant-jazz band 17 Billion Miles of DNA.

McCreary is married to singer/songwriter Raya Yarbrough, with whom he worked on the music of Battlestar Galactica.

Itzhak Perlman (Hebrew: יצחק פרלמן‎; born August 31, 1945) is an Israeli-born violinist, conductor, and instructor of master classes. He is regarded as one of the preeminent violinists of the 20th and early-21st centuries.

Perlman was born in Tel Aviv, British Mandate for Palestine. His parents, Chaim and Shoshana Perlman, were natives of Poland and had independently immigrated to Palestine in the mid-1930s before they met and got married. Perlman first became interested in the violin after hearing a classical music performance on the radio. At the age of three, he was denied entrance to the Shulamit Conservatory for being too small to hold a violin. He instead taught himself how to play the instrument using a toy fiddle until he was old enough to study with Rivka Goldgart at the Shulamit Conservatory and at the Academy of Music in Tel Aviv, where he gave his first recital at age 10, before moving to the United States to study at the Juilliard School with the violin pedagogue, Ivan Galamian, and his assistant Dorothy Delay.

Pinchas Zukerman (Hebrew: פנחס צוקרמן‎, born July 16, 1948) is a violinist, violist, and conductor of Israeli descent. He is considered to be one of the world's preeminent violinists of the 20th and 21st centuries, and his ongoing 45-year career has seen him perform with the world's best-known orchestras and record over 100 works.

Born in Tel Aviv to Yehuda and Miriam Lieberman Zukerman, Zukerman began his musical studies at age 4, on the recorder. His father then taught him clarinet, and picked up the violin at age 8. Isaac Stern and Pablo Casals learned of Zukerman's violin talent during a 1962 visit to Israel. Zukerman subsequently moved to the United States that year for study at the Juilliard School, under the tutelage of Stern and Ivan Galamian. He made his New York début in 1963. In 1967, he shared the Leventritt Prize with the Korean violinist Kyung-wha Chung. His 1969 debut recordings of the concerti by Tchaikovsky (under the direction of Antal Dorati, with the London Symphony Orchestra) and Mendelssohn (with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic) launched a successful recording career that continues to the present day and boasts over 110 releases.

Julia Fischer (born (1983-06-15)15 June 1983) is a German classical violinist and pianist.

Julia Fischer, born in Munich, Germany, is of German-Slovakian parentage. Her mother, Viera Fischer (née Krenková), came from the German minority in Slovakia and immigrated from Košice, Slovakia to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1972. Her father, Frank-Michael Fischer, a mathematician who was born in East Germany, moved in the same year from Eastern Saxony to West Germany.

Fischer began her studies before her fourth birthday, when she received her first violin lesson from Helge Thelen. A few months later she started studying the piano with her mother. Fischer said, "my mother's a pianist and I wanted to play the piano as well, but as my elder brother also played the piano, she thought it would be nice to have another instrument in the family. I agreed to try out the violin and stayed with it." She began her formal violin education at the Leopold Mozart Conservatory in Augsburg under the tutelage of Lydia Dubrowskaya. At the age of nine, Julia Fischer was admitted to the Munich Academy of Music, where she continues to work with Ana Chumachenco.