A01=Bonnie Gordon
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Athanasius Kircher
Author_Bonnie Gordon
automatic-update
castrato
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=AVC
Category=HBG
Category=NHB
Category=PDX
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
early modern
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_music
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
Galileo
hermaphrodite
Language_English
Mediterranean
PA=Available
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
Rome
softlaunch
sound studies
technology
Product details
- ISBN 9780226825144
- Weight: 739g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 31 May 2023
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
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.
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.
A music historian who works across disciplines and creative practices, Bonnie Gordon is associate professor of music at the University of Virginia. She is a founding faculty member of the Equity Center at the University of Virginia and the new Sound Justice lab. She is the author of Monteverdi’s Unruly Women and coeditor of The Courtesan’s Arts. She plays jazz, rock, and classical viola.
