Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Voice Machines: The Castrato, the Cat Piano, and Other Strange Sounds

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

Gordon, Bonnie

Hardcover

Sports GeneralGeneral World HistoryMusic Reference

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0226825140
ISBN13: 9780226825144
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: May 31 2023
Pages: 432
Weight: 1.45
Height: 1.20 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.10
Language: English
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.

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