Sequoia (composition)

Sequoia is an orchestral composition by the American composer Joan Tower. The work was commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra with support from the Jerome Foundation. It was first performed on May 18, 1981 in Alice Tully Hall by the American Composers Orchestra under the conductor Dennis Russell Davies. The piece is dedicated to the concertmistress and first horn player of the orchestra, Jean and Paul Ingraham, respectively.Sequoia was Tower's first major orchestral composition and one of the composer's most performed works.

Composition

Sequoia has a duration of roughly 16 minutes and is composed in three continuous movements. The music is abstractly inspired by the genus of redwood coniferous trees called sequoias of the Northern California coastal forests. Tower described her influences in the score program notes, writing:

In Sequoia, that concept is not only very much present in the score but it actually led to the title (which is meant in an abstract rather than a pictorial sense). What fascinated me about sequoias, those giant California redwood trees, was the balancing act nature had achieved in giving them such great height.

Sequoia (film)

Sequoia is a 1934 American drama film directed by Chester M. Franklin and written by Ann Cunningham, Sam Armstrong and Carey Wilson. The film stars Jean Parker, Russell Hardie, Samuel S. Hinds, Paul Hurst and Willie Fung. The film was released on December 22, 1934, by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Plot

Toni and her father Matthew Martin live in the sequoia forests of California. While Toni is out walking she finds a puma, which she names 'Gato' and a young fawn that she calls 'Malibu'. Toni and her adopted animals become friends quickly. After several years, Toni and her father leave the woods and Gato and Malibu are returned to the wild. Later, when Toni and her father return, they find that the animals in the area have been decimated by logging and hunting. With aggressive hunting parties roaming the area, it is up to Gato and Malibu to survive.

Cast

Sequoia (comics)

Sequoia, (AKA Quoi and Q) is a Marvel Comics character. He is the son of Mantis and the elder member of the Cotati contingent which was transplanted from the Kree home planet Hala to Viet Nam on Earth.

Prophecy

A prophecy read that one day the perfect human female, who would be the Celestial Madonna, would have a union with the perfect male plant of the Cotati race, and from their union would spring the perfect child, who would be the Celestial Messiah; a being that destined to change the universe. A newborn star appeared in the sky above Avengers' Headquarters during the period when Mantis was an active member of the group, proclaimed that the Celestial Madonna's time was at hand. Kang the Conqueror had set up an automatic monitoring device to alert him to this appearance, in hopes of capturing the Madonna and using the child to advance his quest for power, but did not know which of three human females was The Madonna: Mantis, the Scarlet Witch, or Agatha Harkness. Once it was revealed that it was Mantis, she mated with the elder member of the Cotati contingent that had been left on Earth along with a group of the Kree-born Priests of Pama (to protect it from the Star Stalker). Though this Cotati was a tree, this mating was made possible because he took the form of the Avenger known as the Swordsman, who had recently been killed saving her life in battle with Kang. Their baby was named Sequoia, after the noblest of Earth trees.

Conclusion (music)

In music, the conclusion is the ending of a composition and may take the form of a coda or outro.

Pieces using sonata form typically use the recapitulation to conclude a piece, providing closure through the repetition of thematic material from the exposition in the tonic key. In all musical forms other techniques include "altogether unexpected digressions just as a work is drawing to its close, followed by a return...to a consequently more emphatic confirmation of the structural relations implied in the body of the work."

For example:

End (graph theory)

In the mathematics of infinite graphs, an end of a graph represents, intuitively, a direction in which the graph extends to infinity. Ends may be formalized mathematically as equivalence classes of infinite paths, as havens describing strategies for pursuit-evasion games on the graph, or (in the case of locally finite graphs) as topological ends of topological spaces associated with the graph.

Ends of graphs may be used (via Cayley graphs) to define ends of finitely generated groups. Finitely generated infinite groups have one, two, or infinitely many ends, and the Stallings theorem about ends of groups provides a decomposition for groups with more than one end.

Definition and characterization

Ends of graphs were defined by Rudolf Halin (1964) in terms of equivalence classes of infinite paths. A ray in an infinite graph is a semi-infinite simple path; that is, it is an infinite sequence of vertices v₀, v₁, v₂, ... in which each vertex appears at most once in the sequence and each two consecutive vertices in the sequence are the two endpoints of an edge in the graph. According to Halin's definition, two rays r₀ and r₁ are equivalent if there is another ray r₂ (not necessarily different from either of the first two rays) that contains infinitely many of the vertices in each of r₀ and r₁. This is an equivalence relation: each ray is equivalent to itself, the definition is symmetric with regard to the ordering of the two rays, and it can be shown to be transitive. Therefore, it partitions the set of all rays into equivalence classes, and Halin defined an end as one of these equivalence classes.

Endomorphism

In mathematics, an endomorphism is a morphism (or homomorphism) from a mathematical object to itself. For example, an endomorphism of a vector space V is a linear map f: V → V, and an endomorphism of a group G is a group homomorphism f: G → G. In general, we can talk about endomorphisms in any category. In the category of sets, endomorphisms are functions from a set S to itself.

In any category, the composition of any two endomorphisms of X is again an endomorphism of X. It follows that the set of all endomorphisms of X forms a monoid, denoted End(X) (or End_C(X) to emphasize the category C).

Automorphisms

An invertible endomorphism of X is called an automorphism. The set of all automorphisms is a subset of End(X) with a group structure, called the automorphism group of X and denoted Aut(X). In the following diagram, the arrows denote implication:

Endomorphism ring

Any two endomorphisms of an abelian group A can be added together by the rule (f + g)(a) = f(a) + g(a). Under this addition, the endomorphisms of an abelian group form a ring (the endomorphism ring). For example, the set of endomorphisms of Zⁿ is the ring of all n × n matrices with integer entries. The endomorphisms of a vector space or module also form a ring, as do the endomorphisms of any object in a preadditive category. The endomorphisms of a nonabelian group generate an algebraic structure known as a near-ring. Every ring with one is the endomorphism ring of its regular module, and so is a subring of an endomorphism ring of an abelian group, however there are rings which are not the endomorphism ring of any abelian group.