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 (hydrology)

A spring is any natural situation where water flows from an aquifer to the earth's surface. It is a component of the hydrosphere.

Formation

A spring may be the result of karst topography where surface water has infiltrated the Earth's surface (recharge area), becoming part of the area groundwater. The groundwater then travels through a network of cracks and fissure—openings ranging from intergranular spaces to large caves. The water eventually emerges from below the surface, in the form of a karst spring.

The forcing of the spring to the surface can be the result of a confined aquifer in which the recharge area of the spring water table rests at a higher elevation than that of the outlet. Spring water forced to the surface by elevated sources are artesian wells. This is possible even if the outlet is in the form of a 300-foot-deep (91 m) cave. In this case the cave is used like a hose by the higher elevated recharge area of groundwater to exit through the lower elevation opening.

Rainbow (2005 film)

Rainbow (simplified Chinese: 我心飞翔; traditional Chinese: 我心飛翔; pinyin: Wǒ Xīn Fēi Xiáng; literally: "my heart is flying") is a 2005 Chinese film written and directed by Gao Xiaosong, starring Chen Daoming.

Cast

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Rainbow (Ayumi Hamasaki album)

Rainbow (stylized as RAINBOW) is the fifth studio album by Japanese recording artist Ayumi Hamasaki, released on 18 December 2002 by Avex Trax. Production of Rainbow had commenced after the release of Hamasaki's fourth studio album I Am... that January; All lyrics were written by Hamasaki, and Japanese producer Max Matsuura returned to produce the album. Hamasaki increased. The album was Hamasaki's first to feature conversational English lyrics, where in her previous works she had only used single words.

Channelling pop and trip hop music, Rainbow focuses on lighter themes that were established on her previous album. Some songs focus on loneliness, sadness and relationships, while the rest talk about happiness, having fun and nostalgia. Critics' opinions of the album were generally favourable; the composition and lyrical content were commended. However, some critics dismissed Hamasaki's vocals and Matsuura's production. Upon its release, the album entered the Oricon Albums Chart at number one with first week sales of over one million units, becoming her fifth album to reach the top spot, her fourth to debut there, and her fourth to sell over one million copies in its debut week. Rainbow is the eighty-ninth highest selling Japanese album of all time.

The Birthday Massacre

The Birthday Massacre (abbreviated TBM) is a Canadian band, formed in 1999 in London, Ontario, and currently based in Toronto, Ontario. The current line-up consists of Chibi (vocals), Falcore (guitars), Rainbow (guitars), Owen (synthesizers), Nate Manor (bass guitar) and Rhim (drums).

When the band formed in 1999, they were known as Imagica. This name was inspired from the fantasy novel Imajica (1991) by Clive Barker. In 2002, they changed the name to The Birthday Massacre after one of their earlier songs in order to avoid confusion with another group. The song "The Birthday Massacre" was then renamed to "Happy Birthday". According to their vocalist Chibi: "it kind of works well for the music that we're making. Sort of contrasty, you know? Birthday, and massacre. Light, and dark. Cute, and evil".

TBM have released six studio albums: Nothing and Nowhere (2002), Violet (2005), Walking With Strangers (2007), Pins and Needles (2010), Hide and Seek (2012), and Superstition (2014).

Winter

Winter is the coldest season of the year in polar and temperate climates, between autumn and spring. Winter is caused by the axis of the Earth in that hemisphere being oriented away from the Sun. Different cultures define different dates as the start of winter, and some use a definition based on weather. When it is winter in the Northern Hemisphere, it is summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and vice versa. In many regions, winter is associated with snow and freezing temperatures. The moment of winter solstice is when the sun's elevation with respect to the North or South Pole is at its most negative value (that is, the sun is at its farthest below the horizon as measured from the pole), meaning this day will have the shortest day and the longest night. The earliest sunset and latest sunrise dates outside the polar regions differ from the date of the winter solstice, however, and these depend on latitude, due to the variation in the solar day throughout the year caused by the Earth's elliptical orbit (see earliest and latest sunrise and sunset).