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

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

An exploration of the castrato as a critical provocation to explore the relationships between sound, music, voice...
$213.57 AUD
$213.57 AUD
SKU: 9780226825144
Product Type: Books
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Author: Bonnie Gordon
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Subtotal: $213.57
Voice Machines: The Castrato, the Cat Piano, and Other Strange Sounds by Gordon, Bonnie

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

$213.57
Voice Machines: The Castrato, the Cat Piano, and Other Strange Sounds by Gordon, Bonnie

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

$213.57
Author: Bonnie Gordon
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
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.

Author: Bonnie Gordon
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 05/31/2023
Pages: 432
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.45lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.00w x 1.20d
ISBN: 9780226825144


Review Citation(s):
Choice 07/01/2024

About the Author
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.
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