Voice Machines: The Castrato, the Cat Piano, and Other Strange Sounds

The book explores the castrato as a critical provocation to explore the relationships between sound, music, voice instruments, and machines. It argues that the castrati's technologically enhanced voices contributed to a dramatic expansion of musical vocabulary and prompted new ways of imagining sound, the body, and personhood. It also attends to the ways that early modern encounters and inventions participated in making castrati.

Format: Hardback
Length: 432 pages
Publication date: 31 May 2023
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press

In the late 16th century, Italian courts and churches began employing castrato singers, who by the 18th century had achieved celebrity status on the operatic stage. These singers, constructed through surgical alteration and rigorous training, inhabited "mechanized" bodies that produced sounds that unmechanized bodies could not. Their unique timbre, range, and strength contributed to a dramatic expansion of musical vocabulary and prompted new ways of imagining sound, the body, and personhood.

This multi-disciplinary book, which connects sometimes bizarre snippets of history, moves backward and forward in time, deliberately troubling the meaning of concepts like "technology" and "human." Voice Machines attends to the ways that early modern encounters and inventions, including settler colonialism, emergent racialized worldviews, the printing press, gunpowder, and the telescope, participated in making castrati. In Bonnie Gordon's revealing study, castrati serve as a critical provocation to ask questions about the voice, the limits of the body, and the stories historians tell.

Dimension: 229 x 152 x 33 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780226825144