"Ode to a Nightingale" is a poem by John Keats, one of his 1819 odes. It was written either in the garden of the Spaniards Inn, Hampstead, London, or, according to Keats' friend Charles Armitage Brown, under a plum tree in the garden of Keats' house at Wentworth Place, also in Hampstead. According to Brown, a nightingale had built its nest near the house that he shared with Keats in the spring of 1819. Inspired by the bird's song, Keats composed the poem in one day. It was first published in Annals of the Fine Arts the following July. The poem is one of the most frequently anthologized in the English language. "Ode to a Nightingale" is a personal poem which describes Keats' journey into the state of negative capability. The tone rejects the optimistic pursuit of pleasure found within Keats's earlier poems and, instead, explores the themes of nature, transience and mortality, the latter being particularly relevant to Keats. The nightingale described experiences a type of death but does not actually die. Instead, it is capable of living through its song, a fate that humans cannot expect. The poem ends with an acceptance that pleasure cannot last and that death is an inevitable part of life, as Keats imagines the loss of the physical world and sees himself dead—a "sod" over which the nightingale sings. Many critics favor "Ode to a Nightingale" for its themes but some believe that it is structurally flawed because the poem sometimes strays from its main idea.

Joseph Maurice Ravel (7 March 1875 – 28 December 1937) was a French composer, pianist and conductor. He is often associated with Impressionism along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy, although both composers rejected the term. In the 1920s and 1930s Ravel was internationally regarded as France's greatest living composer. Born to a music-loving family, Ravel attended France's premier music college, the Paris Conservatoire; he was not well regarded by its conservative establishment, whose biased treatment of him caused a scandal. After leaving the conservatoire, Ravel found his own way as a composer, developing a style of great clarity and incorporating elements of modernism, baroque, neoclassicism and, in his later works, jazz. He liked to experiment with musical form, as in his best-known work, Boléro (1928), in which repetition takes the place of development. Renowned for his abilities in orchestration, Ravel made some orchestral arrangements of other composers' piano music, of which his 1922 version of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition is the best known. A slow and painstaking worker, Ravel composed fewer pieces than many of his contemporaries. Among his works to enter the repertoire are pieces for piano, chamber music, two piano concertos, ballet music, two operas and eight song cycles; he wrote no symphonies or church music. Many of his works exist in two versions: first, a piano score and later an orchestration. Some of his piano music, such as Gaspard de la nuit (1908), is exceptionally difficult to play, and his complex orchestral works such as Daphnis et Chloé (1912) require skilful balance in performance. Ravel was among the first composers to recognise the potential of recording to bring their music to a wider public. From the 1920s, despite limited technique as a pianist or conductor, he took part in recordings of several of his works; others were made under his supervision.

Hedy Lamarr (; born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler; November 9, 1914 – January 19, 2000) was an Austrian and American actress and inventor. Regarded as a successful film star, she also co-invented a radio guidance system during World War II. After a brief early film career in Czechoslovakia, including the controversial erotic romantic drama Ecstasy (1933), she fled from her first husband, Friedrich Mandl, and secretly moved to Paris. Traveling to London, she met Louis B. Mayer, who offered her a film contract in Hollywood. Lamarr became a film star with her performance in the romantic drama Algiers (1938). She achieved further success with the Western Boom Town (1940) and the drama White Cargo (1942). Lamarr's most successful film was the religious epic Samson and Delilah (1949). She also acted on television before the release of her final film in 1958. She was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960. At the beginning of World War II, along with composer George Antheil, Lamarr co-invented a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of radio jamming by the Axis powers. This approach, conceptualized as a "Secret Communication System," was intended to provide secure, jam-resistant communication for weapon guidance by spreading the signal across multiple frequencies. Similar technology was used in operational systems only beginning in 1962, which was well after World War II and three years after the expiry of the Lamarr-Antheil patent. Frequency hopping, which existed and was utilized before the Lamarr-Antheil patent, is a foundational technology for spread spectrum communications. Its principles are utilized for secure wireless networking, including Bluetooth and early versions of Wi-Fi, which use variants of spread spectrum to protect data from interception and interference.

This is a sortable discography of French Canadian pianist and composer Marc-André Hamelin. He records exclusively for the Hyperion label, although he has recorded for other labels in the past. In addition to the works of commonly heard composers, he has recorded a great deal of non-standard repertoire, such as music of Charles-Valentin Alkan, Leopold Godowsky, Georgy Catoire, Sophie Carmen Eckhardt-Gramatté, as well as his own compositions.

This is a sortable discography of French Canadian pianist and composer Marc-André Hamelin. He records exclusively for the Hyperion label, although he has recorded for other labels in the past. In addition to the works of commonly heard composers, he has recorded a great deal of non-standard repertoire, such as music of Charles-Valentin Alkan, Leopold Godowsky, Georgy Catoire, Sophie Carmen Eckhardt-Gramatté, as well as his own compositions.

This is a list of notable events in music that took place in the year 1951.