mick laBriola

Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns ( 9 October 1835 – 16 December 1921) was a French composer, organist, conductor and pianist of the Romantic era. His best-known works include Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso (1863), the Second Piano Concerto (1868), the First Cello Concerto (1872), Danse macabre (1874), the opera Samson and Delilah (1877), the Third Violin Concerto (1880), the Third (“Organ”) Symphony (1886) and The Carnival of the Animals (1886).

Saint-Saëns was a musical prodigy; he made his concert debut at the age of ten. After studying at the Paris Conservatoire he followed a conventional career as a church organist, first at Saint-Merri, Paris and, from 1858, La Madeleine, the official church of the French Empire. After leaving the post twenty years later, he was a successful freelance pianist and composer, in demand in Europe and the Americas.

As a young man, Saint-Saëns was enthusiastic for the most modern music of the day, particularly that of Schumann, Liszt and Wagner, although his own compositions were generally within a conventional classical tradition. He was a scholar of musical history, and remained committed to the structures worked out by earlier French composers. This brought him into conflict in his later years with composers of the impressionist and expressionist schools of music; although there were neoclassical elements in his music, foreshadowing works by Stravinsky and Les Six, he was often regarded as a reactionary in the decades around the time of his death.

Saint-Saëns held only one teaching post, at the École de Musique Classique et Religieuse in Paris, and remained there for less than five years. It was nevertheless important in the development of French music: his students included Gabriel Fauré, among whose own later pupils was Maurice Ravel. Both of them were strongly influenced by Saint-Saëns, whom they revered as a genius.

John Winston Ono Lennon (born John Winston Lennon; 9 October 1940 – 8 December 1980) was an English singer, songwriter and musician. He gained worldwide fame as the founder, co-lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist of the Beatles. His work included music, writing, drawings and film. His songwriting partnership with Paul McCartney remains the most successful in history as the primary songwriters in the Beatles.

Born in Liverpool, Lennon became involved in the skiffle craze as a teenager. In 1956, he formed the Quarrymen, which evolved into the Beatles in 1960. Sometimes called “the smart Beatle”, Lennon initially was the group’s de facto leader, a role he gradually seemed to cede to McCartney. Through his songwriting in the Beatles, he embraced myriad musical influences, initially writing and co-writing rock and pop-oriented hit songs in the band’s early years, then later incorporating experimental elements into his compositions in the latter half of the Beatles’ career as his songs became known for their increasing innovation. Lennon soon expanded his work into other media by participating in numerous films, including How I Won the War, and authoring In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works, both collections of nonsense writings and line drawings. Starting with “All You Need Is Love“, his songs were adopted as anthems by the anti-war movement and the larger counterculture of the 1960s. In 1969, he started the Plastic Ono Band with his second wife, multimedia artist Yoko Ono, held the two-week-long anti-war demonstration bed-in for peace, and left the Beatles to embark on a solo career.

Lennon and Ono collaborated on many works, including a trilogy of avant-garde albums and several more films. After the Beatles disbanded, Lennon released his solo debut John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and the international top-10 singles “Give Peace a Chance“, “Instant Karma!“, “Imagine“, and “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)“. Moving to New York City in 1971, his criticism of the Vietnam War resulted in a three-year deportation attempt by the Nixon administration. Lennon and Ono separated from 1973 to 1975, during which time he produced Harry Nilsson‘s album Pussy Cats. He also had chart-topping collaborations with Elton John (“Whatever Gets You thru the Night“) and David Bowie (“Fame“). Following a five-year hiatus, Lennon returned to music in 1980 with the Ono collaboration Double Fantasy. He was murdered by Mark David Chapman, three weeks after the album’s release.

As a performer, writer or co-writer, Lennon had 25 number-one singles in the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Double Fantasy, his second-best-selling non-Beatles album, won the 1981 Grammy Award for Album of the Year. That year, he won the Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music. In 2002, Lennon was voted eighth in a BBC history poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. Rolling Stone ranked him the fifth-greatest singer and 38th greatest artist of all time. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame (in 1997) and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (twice, as a member of the Beatles in 1988 and as a solo artist in 1994).

“Never forget that intelligence rules the world and ignorance carries the burden. Therefore, remove yourself as far as possible from ignorance and seek as far as possible to be intelligent.”

Marcus Garvey

The M100 galaxy, cataloged as Messier 100 and NGC 4321, is one of the most impressive and widely studied spiral galaxies in the sky. Located in the Berenice’s Hair constellation, approximately 53 million light years from us,
M100 is an important part of a large group of galaxies located in our cosmic neighborhood : Virgo cluster.

M100 is listed as a spiral galaxy, implying that it has well-defined and symmetrical spiral arms that move out from its central core. With a diameter of approximately 160,000 years light, this galaxy is considered one of the largest and most luminous in the Virgo cluster, making it larger than our Milky Way.

Its spiral arms are home to around 100 billion stars, with magnificent young massive blue stars, gaseous nebulae and dust clouds.
The arms are places where star formation is very active, supported by the vast reserves of gas present in the galaxy.

M100 is also notable for the large number of supernovae that have been observed within it. Over the past century, five supernovae have been observed, the most recent of which is SN 2006X, a Type Ia supernova, which was discovered in February 2006. Astronomers are very interested in Type Ia supernovae because they are a standard for measuring cosmic distances, which contributes to the study of the expansion of the universe.

Just like most spiral galaxies, M100 has an active galactic core that could host a supermassive black hole. Its rotation has been carefully studied to understand the distribution of dark matter in the galaxy.
Astronomers have discovered that the outer parts of the galaxy rotate at a faster rate than visible matter alone could explain, providing further evidence for the presence of dark matter.

We can observe several galaxies and cosmic objects in our image,
in particular the famous galaxy NGC 4312. It is a spiral galaxy of type SA(rs)bc, distant about 55 million light years from Earth. She too is a member of the Virgo cluster.

Compared to other spiral galaxies, NGC 4312 is distinguished by its inclination, offering an almost “edge-on” view, which makes the observation of its spiral structure more delicate.
NGC 4312 spans about 45,000 light years, making it a relatively small galaxy compared to M100.

The sparkling scene depicted in this week’s Hubble Picture of the Week is of the spiral galaxy NGC 5248, located 42 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Boötes. It is also known as Caldwell 45, having been included in a catalogue of visually interesting celestial objects that were known, but weren’t as commonly observed by amateur astronomers as the more famous Messier objects.

NGC 5248 is one of the so-called ‘grand design’ spirals, with prominent spiral arms that reach from near the core out through the disc. It also has a faint bar structure in the centre, between the inner ends of the spiral arms, which is not quite so obvious in this visible-light portrait from Hubble. Features like these which break the rotational symmetry of a galaxy have a huge influence on how matter moves through it, and eventually its evolution through time. They feed gas from a galaxy’s outer reaches to inner star-forming regions, and even to a galaxy’s central black hole where it can kick-start an active galactic nucleus.

These flows of gas have shaped NGC 5248 in a big way; it has many bright ‘starburst regions’ of intense star formation spread across its disc, and it is dominated by a population of young stars. The galaxy even has two very active, ring-shaped starburst regions around its nucleus, filled with young clusters of stars. These ‘nuclear rings’ are remarkable enough, but normally a nuclear ring tends to block gas from getting further into the core of a galaxy. NGC 5248 having a second ring inside the first is a marker of just how forceful its flows of matter and energy are! Its relatively nearby, highly visible starburst regions make the galaxy a target for professional and amateur astronomers alike.

Yo-Yo Ma (born October 7, 1955) is an American cellist. Born to and partially raised by Chinese parents in Paris and educated in New York City, he was a child prodigy, performing from the age of four and a half. He graduated from the Juilliard School and Harvard University, attended Columbia University, and has performed as a soloist with orchestras around the world. He has recorded more than 92 albums and received 19 Grammy Awards.

In addition to recordings of the standard classical repertoire, Ma has recorded a wide variety of folk music, such as American bluegrass music, traditional Chinese melodies, the tangos of Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla, and Brazilian music. He has also collaborated with artists from a diverse range of genres, including Bobby McFerrin, Carlos Santana, Chris Botti, Diana Krall, James Taylor, Miley Cyrus, and Sting.

Ma has been a United Nations Messenger of Peace since 2006. He has received numerous awards, including the Avery Fisher Prize in 1978, The Glenn Gould Prize in 1999, the National Medal of Arts in 2001, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011, Kennedy Center Honors in 2011, the Polar Music Prizein 2012, and the Birgit Nilsson Prize in 2022. He was named as one of Time‘s 100 Most Influential People of 2020.

Ma’s primary performance instrument is the Davidov cello, made in 1712 by Antonio Stradivari.