Phil Ochs

Jacques Offenbach was an excellent violinist by the age of six, he composed when he was eight and played the cello at nine. His most famous work is the witty opera, "The Tales of Hoffmann" which has the German stoywriter E.T.A. Hoffmann as its hero.

Offenbach died in 1880.

Yoko Ono, born in Tokyo, Japan in 1933 is an artist and musician, as well as the widow of musician John Lennon. She moved to the United States while a teenager and studied art at New York’s Sarah Lawrence College. In 1957, she married Japanese composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. In 1964, they divorced and she took her second husband--artist and filmmaker Tony Cox. The couple, married for five years, had one child, Kyoko.

During the 1960s, Ono was successful as a conceptual artist in New York City, and in 1966, she met John Lennon, a member of The Beatles, a world-famous British rock group. The pair fell instantly in love, and in 1969, they married and Lennon changed his name to John Ono Lennon. The couple collaborated both musically and politically, staging publicized antiwar protests and recording a hit single "Give Peace a Chance," under the name of The Plastic Ono Band.

In 1970, The Beatles split-up, and Yoko continued to record and perform music with her husband throughout the 1970s. The couple briefly separated in the early 1970s, but by 1975 were back together. In the same year, the couple had a son, Sean, and retired to raise him full-time. In 1980, they publicly reemerged with the album Double Fantasy, in which they shared creative responsibility. Later in the year, Lennon was assassinated outside of their New York apartment building.

During the 1980s, Ono continued working on her experimental art and music. In 1995, she returned to music in a collaborative project with her twenty-year-old son Sean and his rock band Ima.

Carl Orff lived from 1895 until 1982 and was a German composer of operas, cantatas and musical plays. He is widely known for his work in music education, particularly in exploration of the connections between music and movement. In his compositions he found a similar connection between the dramatic and the musical, couched in his very personal style of writing, with its insistent, repeated patterns of notes and compelling rhythms. Carmina Burana was his best known oratorio. It is based on a medieval poem found in a Bavarian monastery and is the best known of all Orff's works. It is a large scale work making use of the medieval Latin and Old German lyrics found at the monastery of Benediktbeuern. The work has become even more familiar to unmusical audiences by use of elements from it in advertising and in films. Carmina burana is generally performed only as a form of secular oratorio, in the concert- hall, rather than on the stage, as is Catulli carmina (Songs of Catullus), again intended for theatrical use.

Eugene Ormandy was born Budapest, Hungary in 1899. He was a child prodigy on violin and he came to America to play violin in 1920, then took up conducting. He headed the Minneapolis Symphony from 1931 until 1935, before taking the podium of the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1936 (for two years co-conductor with Leopold Stokowski); he remained at that post until his retirement in 1980, maintaining the voluptuousness of sound for which the orchestra was both praised and criticized. He died in 1985.

Seiji Ozawa, was born in 1935 in Hoten, China. He a conductor of Japanese descent and he trained in Japan, Paris, and the U.S.A. He conducted the Toronto and San Francisco Symphonies before beginning in 1973 his long tenure as conductor of the Boston Symphony.