"Miserere mei, Deus" is a motet written to be sung by two choirs. One choir is five voices - soprano, alto, two tenors and bass. The second choir has two sopranos, alto and baritone. One choir sings a simple kind of tune called a fauxbourdon which is based on a plainchant. The other sings a more complicated version, with a top part which goes up to top C (the note two octaves higher than Middle C). The singers also improvised some parts of the music, making up elaborate ornamented parts. These improvisations were not written down, but were passed from singer to singer in the choir.
Allegri wrote the "Miserere" to be sung in the Sistine Chapel during the Easter celebrations. During the service, which started at 3.00am, there would be 27 candles burning. The Pope would gradually extinguish the candles until there was only one left burning. The "Miserere" was performed as the pope prayed at the altar with the single candle.
This piece of music became very popular, and the Vatican did not want anyone else to perform it. No one was allowed to take the music away from the chapel or make copies of it. The Vatican called for excommunication of anyone trying to make a copy. However by 1770 there were three known copies of the music. One of these was given to the Emperor Leopold I by the pope. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart visited the Sistine Chapel during a tour of Europe with his father in 1770. He was just 14 years old, but heard the piece and wrote all the music out from memory later the same day. A second visit enabled him to check that he had it written correctly. It is believed that Mozart's copy of the music was sent to England where it was published by Dr Charles Burney. It would be assumed that Mozart would have written the improvisations in his copy. Burney's version lacks the improvisations, so it possible that he removed them, and destroyed Mozart's copy to avoid trouble with the church. There were no copyright laws in those days, so there was nothing that the Vatican could do about it.
It is believed that the version of the "Miserere mei Deus" performed today, is very different to the work that Allegri composed.
Chronology
Chronology is a word meaning 'the study of time'. It comes from the Greek words "chronos" (time) and "logos" (word). The adjective is chronological.
Putting events in chronological order means: listing them in the order in which they happened.
There are many sciences which deal in different ways with chronology. General is sometimes called "periodization". Historical chronology can deal with history or with the geological history of the earth.
When things are put in chronological order it can sometimes be called a "timeline". Adjective- (of a record of events) following the order in which they occurred (kind of like a timeline)
Indre River
The Indre is a river in central France, left tributary to the Loire River. The Indre and Indre-et-Loire departments are named after this river.
The Indre river has a length of and a drainage basin with an area of of which 18.29% are forests and 77.86% are used for farming.
Its average yearly discharge (volume of water which passes through a section of the river per unit of time) is at Lignières-de-Touraine, Indre-et-Loire.
Average monthly discharge (m/s) at Lignières-de-Touraine
The Indre starts in the "Monts de Saint-Marien", southwestern Massif Central, in the "commune" of Saint-Priest-la-Marche, in the south of the Cher department near the border with the Creuse department, at an altitude of about .
The Indre flows to the northwest, and passes through the Indre and Indre-et-Loire departments, in the Centre-Val de Loire region, and a total of 58 "communes", most of them in the Indre department; the main "communes" are:
Finally, it flows into the Loire River in Avoine, in the Indre-et-Loire department.
The main tributaries of the Indre river are:
Left tributaries:
Right tributaries:
Oberlin Group of Libraries
This is a list of colleges and universities in the Oberlin Group of Libraries:
Pontus (mythology)
In Greek mythology, Pontus or Pontos (, "Póntos" - "Sea") was one of the primordial deities, the personification of the sea. He was a son of Gaia (the Earth), by whom he is the father of Nereus and Phorcys.
Pontus
Pontus () is a region on the southern coast of the Black Sea.
Homo floresiensis
Homo floresiensis ("Flores Man", also called "hobbit") is a probable species in the genus "Homo", to which humans belong.
The remains were found in 2004 on the island of Flores in Indonesia. Parts of the skeletons of nine individuals were found, including one complete cranium (the head). The most important and obvious identifying features of "H. floresiensis" are its small body, and small size of the space for the brain inside the skull. This is why the discoverers have called members of the species "hobbits", after J.R.R. Tolkien's fictional race of roughly the same height.
The remains were discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores by an Australian-Indonesian team of archaeologists in 2003. Archaeologist Mike Morwood and colleagues were looking for evidence of the original human migration of "H. sapiens" from Asia to Australia. They were not expecting to find a new species. They were surprised at the discovery of a nearly complete skeleton of a hominin.
Excavations done after that found seven more skeletons, originally thought to be from 38,000 to 13,000 years ago. An arm bone which they think belongs to "H. floresiensis" was dated at about 74,000 years old. The specimens are not fossilized and have "the consistency of wet blotting paper"; once exposed. The bones had to be left to dry before they could be dug up.
However, more extensive stratigraphic and chronological work pushed the most recent evidence of their existence back to 50,000 years ago. Their skeletal material is now dated to from 100,000 to 60,000 years ago. Stone tools recovered alongside the skeletal remains were from archaeological horizons ranging from 190,000 to 50,000 years ago.
Researchers hope to find preserved mitochondrial DNA to compare with samples from similarly unfossilised specimens of "Homo neanderthalensis" and "H. sapiens".
This hominin is remarkable because it has a small body and brain.
There are also a lot of stone tools found in the cave. The tools are of a size that could be used by the 1 meter tall human. They are dated from 95,000 to 13,000 years ago. They are found in the same archeological layer as an elephant of the extinct genus "Stegodon". The hobbit might have hunted this elephant. The elephant would have been very common throughout Asia during the Quaternary. Other animals that lived on the island at that time were giant rats, Komodo dragons, and even larger species of lizards. "Homo sapiens" reached the region by around 45,000 years ago.
Archaeologist Mike Morwood and colleagues who found the remains say they think the individuals belong to a new species, "H. floresiensis", in our human genus "Homo". The discoverers also say that "H. floresiensis" might have lived at the same time as modern humans ("Homo sapiens") on Flores.
Not everyone agrees that this is a new species. Indonesian anthropologist Teuku Jacob suggested that the skull of LB1 was a modern human with microcephaly. This is a disorder that causes the bones of the head to stop growing. Another study says that perhaps the individuals were born without a working thyroid gland, which would result in the small size of the hominins because of a disorder called myxedema.