Binding: Hardcover
Description: An exploration of the castrato as a critical provocation to explore the relationships between sound music voice instrument and machine. Italian courts and churches began employing castrato singers in the late sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century the singers occupied a celebrity status on the operatic stage. Constructed through surgical alteration and further modified by rigorous training castrati inhabited human bodies that had been mechanized to produce sounds in ways that unmechanized bodies could not. The voices of these technologically enhanced singers with 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. Connecting sometimes bizarre snippets of history this multi - disciplinary book 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.
Title: Voice Machines The Castrato The Cat Piano And Other Strange Sounds
Author(s): Gordon Bonnie
Publisher: The University Of Chicago Press
Barcode: 9780226825144
Pages: 432 Pages, 49 Halftones, 8 Line Drawings
Publication Date: 5/31/2023
Category: History Of Science