Kepler's Witch - An Astronomer's Discovey of Cosmic Order Amid Religious War

Set against the backdrop of the witchcraft trial of his mother, this lively biography of Johannes Kepler- 'the Protestant Galileo' and 16th century mathematician and astronomer - reveals the surprisingly spiritual nature of the quest of early modern science.
In the style of Dava Sobel's Galileo's Daughter, Connor's book brings to life the tidal forces of Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and social upheaval. Johannes Kepler, who discovered the three basic laws of planetary motion, was persecuted for his support of the Copernican system. After a neighbour accused his mother of witchcraft, Kepler quit his post as the Imperial mathematician to defend her.

Can one invention really change the world? Before the mid-fifteenth century, books were printed by hand, making them rare and expensive. Reading and learning remained a privilege of the wealthy--until Johannes Gutenberg developed a machine called the printing press. Gutenberg, a German metalworker, began in the 1440s by making movable type--small metal letters that were arranged to form words and sentences, replacing handwritten letters. Movable type fit into frames on the printing press, and the press then produced many copies of the same page.

Johannes Brahms

The Teaching Company
In both his life and his music, Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) was a man of contrasts.
He composed serious Teutonic music and joyful dance music.
He was miserly with himself and exceedingly generous with family and associates.
He was kind to working people and known for his biting, malicious wit in artistic and aristocratic circles.
No one's idea of an easy man to know, Brahms destroyed a good deal of his own work and almost all of his lifetime's correspondence, in later years even collecting his letters from friends so that he could consign them to the flames.
This course links the complexities of Brahms the man with the electrifying music of Brahms the composer through biographical information and musical commentary.
Brahms had vowed early in life to be lonely but free. He never married, owned a home, held a job for more than a few years, or took on a commissioned piece.
In art, he showed a similar independence of spirit. He believed in traditional musical genres and forms as challenges, not as hindrances to expressive freedom but as healthy sources of stimulation for his awesome artistic powers.
Unlike, for example, Beethoven, Brahms did not reinvent his art repeatedly in response to personal emotional crises, but rather found his essential compositional voice while in his mid-20s, and developed it in more of an evolutionary than a revolutionary fashion.