Judith Weir’s music has harmonies which are very exciting and original. Her Christmas carol "Illuminare" has become very popular, but it is quite difficult and needs a good choir to pitch the notes of the dissonant chords. She often uses medieval history as inspiration for her music, as well as music from her native Scotland, e.g. piobaireachd, which is a kind of variation form using small intervals. Her music often tells stories. Her operas include "A Night at the Chinese Opera", "The Vanishing Bridegroom", "Blond Eckbert", and "Armida", an opera for television.
From 1995 to 2000, she was the Artistic Director of the Spitalfields Festival in London. She has composed works for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. She has received many honours, including the CBE in 1995.
Chorus
Chorus can mean several things:
Vassal
A vassal during the feudalism of medieval Europe, was someone who had shared duties with a lord. Usually the vassal provided soldiers to the lord. The lord used his army of soldiers from all of his vassals to protect those vassals. The lord also gave him the piece of land that he held as a fief. By analogy the term "vassal" is used also for similar systems in other feudal societies.
The development of the "vassal", in a society that was increasingly organised around the concept of "lordship"– in French the "seigneur"– is one sign that Antiquity ended and the Early Middle Ages began. Lordship is the basic social institution as Tacitus described them in his book "Germania". The Roman West experienced them for the first time in the Migration Period.
As the system developed in the seventh century, the vassals were gangs of freemen who subjected themselves, in some degree of formality, to the authority of a leader, from whom they could expect to be fed, clothed and armed. The quality of a vassal was only in his fighting ability and the strength of his loyalty. The etymology (where the word came from) of "vassal" is from a Celtic word "gwas" "boy" that meant a young male slave, with a Latinised form, "vassus" that appeared in Salic Law (Rouche 1987 p 429), like the way "knight" came from the from Old English word "cniht" and similar words in Frisian and Dutch, all meaning "lad" .
Migration period
The migration period, or barbarian invasions or Völkerwanderung, happened in AD 300–700 in Europe, at the end of ancient history and during the Early Middle Ages.
The migrations included the Goths, Vandals, Franks, and other Germanic, Bulgar, and Slavic tribes. They may have been influenced by attacks of the Huns in the East and may also be connected to the Turkic migrations in Central Asia, overpopulation, or climate changes. The migration period also included groups of Angles, Saxons, Frisians, and some Jutes to Britain.
Migrations would continue well into the Middle Ages, beyond 1000 AD, with successive waves of Slavs, Alans, Avars, Bulgars, Hungarians, Pechenegs, Cumans, and Tatars that changed the ethnic makeup of Eastern Europe. Western European historians, however, tend to stress the migrations that were most relevant to Western Europe.
San Francisco Bay Area
The San Francisco Bay Area, also known as the Bay Area, is a metropolitan area that goes around the San Francisco Bay in Northern California. It includes the cities of San Francisco, San José, and Oakland, and their many suburbs. It also includes the smaller urban and rural areas of the North Bay. Over seven million people live in the San Francisco Bay Area. The San Francisco Bay Area is the 43rd largest metropolitan area in the world in population.
The Bay Area includes cities, towns, military bases, airports, and related regional, state, and national parks.
San José is the largest city in the Bay Area since 1990 and the tenth largest city in America. But for most of its history, San Francisco was the city with the most people. San Francisco is still the city people pay the most attention to, and it is the major cultural center in the region.
Bay Area Rapid Transit connects the different parts of the Bay Area.
The region north of the Golden Gate Bridge is known locally as the North Bay. This area includes Marin County and continues north into Sonoma and Napa counties and east to Solano County. With some exceptions, this region is quite rich: Marin County is listed as the richest in the nation.
The City and County of San Francisco is generally placed in a category by itself in terms of geography and culture. It is separated by water from the north, west and east, and by a county line from its neighbor cities to the South. San Francisco has been the cultural, financial and urban center of the region for a long time. For most of the Bay Area's history, it has also been the main population center. But because the size of the county is limited, the growth of the city was limited as well. As a result, other cities and counties have had more population growth.
The area between the South Bay and the City and County of San Francisco is the San Francisco Peninsula, known locally as "The Peninsula". This area includes many small cities and suburban communities in San Mateo County and the northwestern part of Santa Clara County, as well as several towns along the Pacific coast, such as Pacifica and Half Moon Bay.
The eastern side of the bay, consisting of Alameda and Contra Costa counties, is known locally as the East Bay. The East Bay is split into two regions, the inner East Bay, which is on the coast of the Bay, and the outer East Bay, including the inland valleys separated from the inner East Bay by hills and mountains.
The communities along the southern edge of the Bay are known as the South Bay, Santa Clara Valley, and Silicon Valley.
This region is home to a large number of major technology companies. Some tech companies in the South Bay are Intel, AMD, Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Apple, Google, and Yahoo!, Microsoft and much much more.
The San Francisco Bay Area is one of the richest regions in the United States.
San Francisco Bay
San Francisco Bay is a shallow, productive estuary through which water draining about forty percent of California, flowing in the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers from the Sierra Nevada mountains and Central Valley, enters the Pacific Ocean. Technically, both rivers flow into Suisun Bay, which help flows through the Carquinez Strait to meet with the Napa River at the entrance to San Pablo Bay, which connects at its south end to San Francisco Bay, although the entire group of interconnected bays are often referred to as "the San Francisco Bay."
San Francisco Bay lies in the US state of California and is surrounded by a region known as the San Francisco Bay Area, that is near the big cities of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose.
The Bay covers somewhere between 400 and 1,600 square miles (1,040 to 4,160 square kilometres), depending on which sub-bays (such as San Pablo Bay), estuaries, wetlands, and so on are included in the measurement.
Ahmed Yassin
Ahmed Yassin (January 1, 1937 – March 22, 2004) was a spiritual leader of the militant Palestinian group Hamas. Yassin's birth date is in dispute. He claimed he was born 1/1/1938, however, his passport indicated 1/1/1937. To some he was a hero, to some he was a notorious member of a terrorist organization. He was also a symbolic figure for Palestinians to fight against Israel.
Yassin was born in al-Jura, British Mandate of Palestine. He helped create Hamas and became its spiritual leader in 1987. To other members of Hamas he was a hero but he was blamed by the Israeli government for planning suicide bombings and other attacks against Israel. He claimed that was the only way of fighting occupation. He was confined to a wheelchair because he was paralyzed since age 12, he was also nearly blind and could barely hear. He was very powerful and influential. He was assassinated in an airstrike in Gaza City by the Israeli Army after he left a mosque in Gaza in the early morning hours.
Field strength