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2 books match the query 'Performing Politics'

cover of Ceremony and Power: Performing Politics in Rome between Republic and Empire

Ceremony and Power

Performing Politics in Rome between Republic and Empire

Geoffrey S. Sumi

University of Michigan Press, 2015

In Ceremony and Power, Geoffrey Sumi is concerned with the relationship between political power and public ceremonial in the Roman Republic, with particular focus on the critical months following Caesar's assassination and later as Augustus became the first emperor of Rome. The book traces the use of a variety of public ceremonies, including assemblies of the people, triumphs, funerals, and games, as a means for politicians in this period of instability and transition to shape their public images and consolidate their power and prestige. Ultimately, Sumi shows that the will of the people, whether they were the electorate assembled at the comitia, the citizen body at the contio, the spectators at the theater, the crowd at the triumph, or mourners at a funeral, strongly influenced the decisions and actions of Roman aristocrats.

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cover of Performing Politics: Music and Theater in Berlin Around 1800

Performing Politics

Music and Theater in Berlin Around 1800

Katherine Hambridge

University of Chicago Press, 2027

A new account of the emergence of modern cultural politics through a study of music and theater in Berlin around 1800.

Berlin around 1800 has been seen—at the time and since—as somewhat behind other major European cities in terms of its musical culture, peripheral to the momentous developments attributed to the period. By contrast, early nineteenth-century Berlin has been exhaustively studied as the site of a nascent German-national movement and the Prussian Reforms. In Performing Politics, Katherine Hambridge examines the confluence of music and politics in Berlin around 1800, challenging the dichotomies of being behind or ahead, and central or peripheral, in order to tell new stories about nineteenth-century German history, musical and otherwise.

Performing Politics emphasizes events as much as repertoires, paying special attention to the noncanonical: dynastic birthday celebrations, the music of historical dramas, political song and communal singing, and popular music theater. By focusing our attention on the unfamiliar specificity of the Berlin Nationaltheater, Hambridge reenergizes our understanding of 1800–1815 as a key period in the development of musical and political modernity. Using sources largely unexploited by musicologists and phenomena neglected by historians, she reveals the quotidian aesthetics, values, and practices that shaped both the sociopolitical narratives and musical developments of the time. Performing Politics is thus not only a history of music and theater in Berlin at a critical moment, but a music history of modern cultural politics.

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