On 12 September 2010, Muse won an MTV Video Music Award for Best Special Effects. It was for the promo for "Uprising". On 21 November, Muse won American Music Award for Favorite Artist in the Alternative Rock Music Category. On 2 December, it was announced that Muse had been nominated for three awards for the 53rd Grammy Awards. It was nominated for Best Rock Performance By a Duo or Group with Vocals - ("Resistance"); Best Rock Song - ("Resistance"), and Best Rock Album: ("The Resistance"). Muse was named the Billboard Alternative and Rock artist for 2010. This was because its songs, "Uprising", "Resistance" and "Undisclosed Desires" reached first, sixth and 49th on the year end Alternative Song chart respectively. At the 53rd Grammy Awards on 13 February 2011, Muse won the Grammy Award for Best Rock Album for "The Resistance".
Muse are an alternative rock band. They are often called space rock and progressive rock bands. Their music also mixes elements from different genres. These genres are electronic music, hard rock, classical music and rock opera. The band was described as a "trashy three-piece" by Matthew Bellamy on the BBC during 2002.
Dominic Howard said that he was a little confused by the progressive rock label that muse fell under, because "[He would] associate (the progressive rock label) it with 10-minute guitar solos." He added: "A lot of bands are quite ambitious with their music, mixing lots of different styles — and when I see that I think it's great."
Astrology
Astrology is the belief the positions of the stars and movements of the planets of the Solar System, and also asteroids and other stars, but not as much, have an influence on the events, lives, and behavior of people.
An astrologer looks at the planets' positions and tries to understand a person's character or tries to predict the future. Modern astrologers see astrology as a symbolic language. It is also seen as an art, or a kind of divination.
Astrology and astronomy started out as the same thing, but today they are very different.
Newspapers and websites often print or post horoscopes. These horoscopes claim to predict a persons future based on their birth sign.
A person's astrological sign (usually referring to Sun sign) is based on their birthday. A list of astrological signs is below.
Theatre of ancient Greece
The theatre of ancient Greece was at its best from 550 BC to 220 BC. It was the beginning of modern western theatre, and some ancient Greek plays are still performed today. They invented the genres of tragedy (late 6th century ), comedy (486 ) and satyr plays.
The city-state of Athens was a great cultural, political and military power during this period. Drama was at its centre. Theatre was part of a festival called the Dionysia, which honoured the god Dionysus. In the Dionysia, the playwrights presented their work to an audience. It was a competition, with a winner and prizes. These two main genres were never mixed: they each had their own typical structure. Athens exported the festival to its numerous colonies and allies in order to promote their way of life.
Only men were allowed as actors. The chorus were men, as were the actors. Technically, they had to be citizens of Athens, which only applied to free-born men plus a few special cases. The actors wore masks, so that the people would know which persona (character) the actor played.
The best known writers of plays are Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides for tragedies, and Aristophanes for comedies.
Some think early Greek religion and theatre were influenced by Central Asian shamanistic practices. A large number of Orphic graffiti discovered in Olbia seems to show that the colony was a major point of contact. Eli Rozik points out that the shaman can be seen as an early type of actor influencing the rituals of early Greek theatre.
Greek tragedy as we know it was made in Athens some years before 532 BC, when Thespis was the earliest recorded playwright. He won the first theatrical contest held at Athens, so he was the leader of the dithyrambs performed in and around Attica. Dithyrambs were ancient hymns sung in praise of the god of wine and fertility, Dionysus. They had a wild and ecstatic nature.
By Thespis' time the dithyramb had evolved far away from its cult roots. It had become a narrative, ballad-like genre. Because of this Thespis is often called the "Father of Tragedy". The statesman Solon is said to have created poems in which characters speak with their own voice. Spoken recitations, known as "rhapsodes", of Homer's epics were popular in festivals before 534 BC. Thespis's contribution to drama is unclear, but his name is remembered in the common term for performer—a 'thespian'.
The dramatic performances were important to the Athenians – this is made clear by the Dionysian festival. This was organized perhaps to foster loyalty among the tribes of Attica. These had been recently created by Cleisthenes, who founded Greek democracy. The festival was created roughly around 508 BC.
Phrynichus was the first poet known to use a historical subject – his "Fall of Miletus", 493, told the fate of the town of Miletus after it was conquered by the Persians. He is also thought to be the first to use female characters (though not female performers).
Until the Hellenistic period, all tragedies were unique pieces written in honour of Dionysus and played only once, so that today we only have the pieces that were still remembered well enough to have been repeated when repetition of old tragedies became fashion.
After the Great Destruction of Athens by the Persian Empire in 480 BC, the town and acropolis were rebuilt, and theatre became an even more major part of Athenian culture and civic pride. The centre-piece was the competition between three tragic playwrights at the Theatre of Dionysus, twice a year. Each submitted three tragedies, plus a satyr play (a comic, burlesque version of a mythological subject). From 486 BC, each playwright also submitted a comedy. Aristotle claimed that Aeschylus added the second actor, and that Sophocles introduced the third. Apparently the Greek playwrights never used more than three actors.
Tragedy and comedy were viewed as completely separate genres, and no plays ever merged aspects of the two. Satyr plays dealt with the mythological subject matter of the tragedies, but in a purely comedic manner. However, as they were written over a century after the Athenian Golden Age, it is not known whether dramatists such as Sophocles and Euripides would have thought about their plays in the same terms.
The power of Athens declined following its defeat in the Peloponnesian War against the Spartans. From that time on, the theatre started performing old tragedies again. Although its theatrical traditions seem to have lost their vitality, Greek theatre continued into the Hellenistic period (the period following Alexander the Great's conquests in the fourth century BC). The main Hellenistic theatrical form was not tragedy but 'New Comedy', comic episodes about the lives of ordinary citizens. The only playwright from the period whose work has survived is Menander. One of New Comedy's most important contributions was its influence on Roman comedy, an influence that can be seen in the surviving works of Plautus and Terence.
The plays originally had a chorus of up to 50 people, who performed the plays in verse accompanied by music, beginning in the morning and lasting until the evening.
The performance space was a simple semi-circular space, the "orchestra", where the chorus danced and sang. The orchestra was on a flattened terrace at the foot of a hill, the slope of which produced a natural "theatron", (watching place). Later, the term "theatre" came to be applied to the whole area of theatron, orchestra, and skené (scene).