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

Online ISBN:
9780226825151
Print ISBN:
9780226825144
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
Book

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

Bonnie Gordon
Bonnie Gordon
University of Virginia
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Published online:
18 January 2024
Published in print:
31 May 2023
Online ISBN:
9780226825151
Print ISBN:
9780226825144
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press

Abstract

Italian courts and churches began employing castrato singers in the late sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century, their voices carried across Europe. Thanks to surgical alteration and rigorous training, these singers inhabited human bodies with voices that did remarkable things. This multi-disciplinary book connects sometimes bizarre snippets of history in a narrative that moves backward and forward in time, deliberately troubling the meaning of concepts like “technology” and “human.” Along the way the book attends to how early modern inventions, like the printing press, gunpowder, and the telescope, participated in making castrati, settler colonialism, emergent racialized worldviews. Far from anomalous figures, castrati resonated with wonderous objects and phenomena made by manipulating natural material such as the hydraulic organs and fireworks. And they sounded the cusp of the north and south, the enlightened and the unenlightened, the human and the machine, the human and the animal. The figure of the castrato breaks apart Enlightenment epistemologies and reveals a premodern world in which contradictory understandings of emergent sex, the human body, power, and identity were as urgent as they are in the twenty first century. Historiographies and their stories invite the contemporary reader to embrace the space between fiction and reality.

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