An exploration of the castrato as a critical provocation to explore the relationships between sound, music, voice instrument, and machine.\nItalian 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.\nConnecting 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.

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

Arts & Photography

Gordon, Bonnie

Music

University of Chicago Press

Monteverdi's Unruly Women examines the composer's madrigals and music dramas for what they can tell us about the musical and cultural world of singing and the voice in early modern Italy. Monteverdi's music demanded trained, female voices to make dramatic and expressive statements. At a time when singing was not entirely acceptable for respectable women his music allowed women to use their voices to gain power. Bonnie Gordon also explores the social and musical environment in which the singers lived and worked. Using key primary source material such as singing treatises and Renaissance writings on medicine and acoustics, Gordon contributes to two distinct disciplines: she brings an increased engagement with medical and literary representations of the female body to the growing field of scholarship treating gender and music, and adds to a well-established industry of scholarship devoted to the perception of gender and the body in early modern Europe.

Monteverdi's Unruly Women: The Power of Song in Early Modern Italy (New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism, Series Number 14)

Cambridge University Press

Anatomy of the Image Maps According to Merriam-Webster's Third International Dictionary of the English Language

Reference

Dictionaries & Thesauruses

Visual Studies Workshop Pr

This great preparation tool includes a previously undisclosed official LSAT (February 1997), with explanations for each and every question in all four multiple-choice sections.

The Official LSAT Prep Test with Explanations Volume 1

Law School Admission Council

The only official guide to the 182 American Bar Association -approved- law schools in the United States. Contains up-to-date admission criteria and other essential admission information provided by the schools themselves.

Official Guide to U.S. Law Schools 2001

Education & Teaching

Higher & Continuing Education

Phossy Jaw and the French Match Workers: Occupational Health and Women In the Third Republic (Routledge Library Editions: Women and Business)

Business & Money

Routledge

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Books by Gordon, Bonnie