Sacrifice is the offering of food, objects or the lives of animals or people to a higher purpose or to God or the gods as an act of propitiation or worship.

While sacrifice often implies ritual killing, the term offering (Latin oblatio) can be used for bloodless sacrifices of cereal food or artifacts. For offerings of liquids (beverages) by pouring, the term libation is used.

The Latin term came to be used of the Christian eucharist in particular, sometimes named a "bloodless sacrifice" to distinguish it from blood sacrifices. In individual pre-Christian ethnic religions, terms translated as "sacrifice" include the Indic yajna, the Greek thusia, the Germanic blōtan, the Semitic qorban/qurban, etc.

The term is also used metaphorically to describe selfless good deeds for others or a short term loss in return for a greater power gain, such as in a game of chess. Recently it has also come into use as meaning 'doing without something' or 'giving something up' (see also self-sacrifice).

The practice of sacrifice is seen in the oldest records. The archaeological record contains human and animal corpses with sacrificial marks long before any written records of the practice. Sacrifices are a common theme in most religions, though the frequency of animal, and especially human, sacrifices are rarely performed today.

Sir Elton Hercules John, CBE (born Reginald Kenneth Dwight on 25 March 1947) is an English rock singer-songwriter, composer, pianist and occasional actor. He has worked with lyricist Bernie Taupin as his songwriter partner since 1967; they have collaborated on more than 30 albums to date.

In his four-decade career John has sold more than 250 million records, making him one of the most successful artists of all time. His single "Candle in the Wind 1997" has sold over 33 million copies worldwide, and is the best selling single in Billboard history. He has more than 50 Top 40 hits, including seven consecutive No. 1 US albums, 56 Top 40 singles, 16 Top 10, four No. 2 hits, and nine No. 1 hits. He has won six Grammy Awards, four Brit Awards, an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award and a Tony Award. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked him Number 49 on its list of the 100 greatest artists of all time.

John was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994. Having been named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1996, John received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II for "services to music and charitable services" in 1998.

Lisa Gerrard (born 12 April 1961) is an Australian musician, singer, and composer who rose to prominence as part of the music group Dead Can Dance with former music partner Brendan Perry.

Since her career began in 1981, she has been involved in a wide range of projects. Gerrard received a Golden Globe Award for the music score to the film Gladiator, on which she collaborated with Hans Zimmer. In addition to singing, she is an instrumentalist for much of her work, most prolifically using the yangqin (a Chinese hammered dulcimer).

Lisa Gerrard was born 12 April 1961 in Melbourne and grew up in the suburb of Prahran with her Irish immigrant parents. On her upbringing, she has said she grew up with "Mediterranean music blaring out of the houses" and that this influenced her music, particularly on later Dead Can Dance albums and in her solo and collaborative works.

Gerrard's first foray into forming bands and creative music-making was the highly experimental Little Band scene. It was at one of these little band events that she first met Dead Can Dance cofounder Brendan Perry. Perry recalls, "It never occurred to me that we would one day collaborate musically together because at the time I thought her music was too avant garde. I particularly remember one song that she sang about finding a man in the park and asking her mother if she could bring him home to keep in her wardrobe as she attacked this chinese dulcimer with two bamboo sticks."

Pieter Bourke is an Australian composer, keyboardist, percussionist and audio engineer. He has recorded several projects with ex-Dead Can Dance founding member Lisa Gerrard, and was a touring member of Dead Can Dance's 1996 Spiritchaser tour. He also collaborated with Australian musician David Thrussell (alias Black Lung), first as part of the latter's band Snog, then just the two of them under the project name Soma. More recently, he formed the Dub Reggae outift Secret Masters with fellow Australian Brian Westbrook. Bourke and Gerrard received two shared Golden Globe nominations for Best Original Score, in 2000 for The Insider (1999), and in 2002 for Ali (2001).

Pieter Bourke began his career in 1988 with the Australian band Eden. Consisting of Sean Bowley (vocals, guitar), Ross Healy (bass) and Bourke (keyboards, rhythm programming and percussion), Eden performed regularly in Melbourne’s alternative scene beginning in 1988. The Light Between Worlds EP was released in 1989 on the Scottish label Nightshift Records. This was supported by the release of a 7” single, Searching For Angels Hands, which broadened Eden’s audience in Australia through a performance on the national music television programme Countdown Revolution.

Michael Laurence Nyman, CBE (born 23 March 1944 in Stratford, London) is a British composer of minimalist music, pianist, librettist and musicologist, known for the many film scores he wrote during his lengthy collaboration with the filmmaker Peter Greenaway, and his multi-platinum soundtrack album to Jane Campion's The Piano. His operas include The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Letters, Riddles and Writs, Noises, Sounds & Sweet Airs, Facing Goya, Man and Boy: Dada, Love Counts, and Sparkie: Cage and Beyond, and he has written six concerti, four string quartets, and many other chamber works, many for his Michael Nyman Band, with and without whom he tours as a performing pianist. Nyman stated that he prefers to write opera rather than other sorts of music.

Nyman was born in Stratford, London. He was educated at the Sir George Monoux Grammar School, Walthamstow. He studied at King's College, London under Alan Bush., and was accepted at the Royal Academy of Music in September, 1961, and studied with Bush and Thurston Dart, focusing on piano and seventeenth-century baroque music. He won the Howard Carr Memorial Prize for composition in July 1964.