The Castrati’s Vocal Instrumentalization as Machine Aesthetics

In her article, "It's Not About the Cut: The Castrato's Instrumentalized Song," Bonnie Gordon deftly frames the castrato as an outgrowth of technological and material processes – both in their genesis (i.e., their castration) and, perhaps more importantly, in the ways they conceptualized and enacted the singing process. In doing so, she self-consciously goes against the grain of much Western discourse that obscures the voice's materiality by "posit(ing) the impalpable individuality of the soul" (Gordon, 2015, p. 649), and instead highlights the importance of further explorations of the voice’s materiality. In the process, she also draws attention to ways this topic has been situated historically, demonstrating that "the physics of the metaphysical are not new ideas but instead are a rediscovery… of early modern concepts" (Gordon, 2015, p. 650). I believe this article would make a welcome addition to the curriculum in King's Musicology MMus program, as its framing of the castrato voice as a kind of proto "aesthetic of mechanization" would tessellate well into discussions of Giles Masters' essay, "Mimetic Mechanicity." Furthermore, its implications on listening habitus could equip students with novel tools with which to approach the assignment wherein they write about a sound recording of their choosing. 

            As Gordon (2015) notes, "The castrato is matter instrumentalized, in that the boy before his castration stood as a soundmaking thing; surgery and vocal training were the technologies of that thing's transformation" (p. 653) -- a transformation that was also facilitated by the musical community's growing understanding of the biological processes involved in the act of phonation at the time (Davies, 2014, p. 16). In his elucidation of some of the literature surrounding Mossolov's "Iron Foundry" and Honegger's "Pacific 231," Masters (2024) notes "the appeal of industrial technologies to composers in search of post-Romantic modes of expression" (p. 75). In light of both of these assertions, attempts to instantiate machine sounds in music throughout the 20th century could be considered an outgrowth of 17th/18th-century musicians’ desire to use science and technology to inform musical aesthetics, thereby framing Giles’ essay in a broader historical context for students.

            Gordon (2015) also notes that the technological processes involved in creating the castrato voice were not the only ways these musicians represented a de-personalization or “instrumentalization” of musical aesthetics. The castrato also “embodied these… (technological) efforts in the performance of vocal music that exceeded the capacities of the unaltered human voice, in his spectacular coloratura, length of his long tones, and in the startling breadth of his tessitura” (p. 658). These descriptors of castrati seemingly defying the laws of nature in their vocal prowess are particularly evident in the famous showpiece arias written for Farinelli, such as “Son Qual Nave,” with its blindingly fast runs, jumps of intervals as wide as 11th's, and range spanning from F3 to F5 (Broschi, 1743), as well as “Alto Giove,” with its long phrases spanning up to 10 bars in a Lento tempo without room for a breath and numerous calls to execute messa di voce’s, requiring a herculean amount of glottal regulation of airflow (Porpora, 1735). In these ways, as Masters (2024) argues Mossolov does in the “Iron Foundry,” the castrati and their admirers exalted “the power of the human genius that has subjugated the forces of nature” (p. 86), which, as Gordon (2015) astutely recognizes, was what Freud posited in Civilization and its Discontents is the ultimate goal of all technological innovation (p. 658).

Fascinatingly, it seems inherent in this "aesthetic of mechanization," regardless of the time period in which it manifests, that it necessarily entails charges of being pure spectacle. In the case of 20th-century works like the "Iron Foundry," this resulted in accusations of the resultant music being a "shallowly programmatic" mimesis that "was difficult to reconcile with Romantic and modernist notions of artistic originality, not least because it seemed to require an instability or even renunciation of individual personality" (Masters, 2024, p. 93). This charge could just as easily have been one levelled at the "inhuman" vocal proficiency of the castrati. As J.Q. Davies (2014) notes in his book Romantic Anatomies of Performance – a text which, like Gordon's, explores how materiality mediates the subjectivity of musical virtuosi, the castrati were Hermaean, in that the contemporaneous discourse surrounding them characterized them as frictionless figures who were pure mimesis – something that could "be achieved only with devotion, sacrifice, and… privation," resulting in the complete abnegation of the self (p. 20). Consequently, because they represented an unmediated ideal of geno-song, they, like the "Iron Foundry," also lacked the "subjectivity" that less materially foregrounded music could represent.

Discussions like this would seem to indicate that humans may have an inherent desire to equate sonic mechanicity or embodiment with a lack of “full subjectivity” (Masters, 2024, p. 93); however, this is not always the case. As Gordon (2015) writes in her etymology of the word “organ,” the word itself “derives from the Latin organum, which means instrument, and which comes from a Greek word that means tool, instrument, or organ of the body” (p. 654). As the writings of authors like Giovanni Battista Mancini (1912, pp. 53-54) demonstrate, at least as late as the 18th century, “The singing voice was understood to work via (an explicitly mechanical) process: it was animated by the breath with air from the chest through the throat and into the mouth lips, and teeth gave it articulation as speech or song” (Gordon, 2015, pp. 655-656). As a consequence, these authors and their contemporaries saw “no ontological difference between organs endowed with sense and those without,” (Gordon, 2015, p. 656), indicating that this is merely a temporally situated attitude.

Despite seemingly running counter to the aforementioned Romantic/modernist discomfort with artistic renunciation of the “immaterial” self, a fascination with the material substrate of subjectivity was certainly not limited to the Baroque Era. As Gordon (2015) notes, Wagner’s music can also be thought of as a natural outgrowth of the “instrumentalization” of the voice, given its “subordination of voice to the complete work” (p. 662). And, like the castrati represented innovations in the virtuosity of the human voice, so too did Wagner’s music in different ways, such as the sheer volume of sound a singer has to produce to be heard over his instrumentation and the taxing degree of audiation required of singers given his music’s heavy chromaticism. Though whether his music represents an epochal shift in this regard or if this is more of a retrospective appellation is up for debate, despite the ubiquity of attestations to the “Bayreuth bark” in the late 19th century. A survey of the most famous Wagnerian exponents of the early recorded era, such as Lilli Lehmann (Mozart, 1782), Marianne Brandt (Donizetti, 1833), and, to a lesser extent, Hermann Winkelmann (Sucher, 1867), demonstrate that the only singers on record who originated roles in Wagner’s operas had a thorough grounding in those Bel Canto techniques espoused by the castrati, such as mastery of coloratura, the messa di voce, both ends of the spectrum of dynamic modulation, and seamless legato phrasing.

Exploring the ways early recordings can inform the musicological community’s understanding of pre-phonograph performance practices and aesthetics can provide a unique way to “write about sound without a material, audio record of it” (McMurray & Mukhopadhyay, 2024, p. 10). As many other contemporary scholars of the castrati, such as Martha Feldman (2015, p. 79) and Wendy Heller (2005, p. 308) have noted, the castrato voice “remains fundamentally inaudible for modern listeners—an impossible object of study” (Gordon, 2015, p. 650). Quite often, the only solo recordings made by a castrato – those by Alessandro Moreschi, are invoked in discussing the inaccessibility of understanding the castrato voice, for they are all too often dismissed as relics of a singer who “was then past his prime,” preserved by the primitive “roughness of early recording tech” (Gordon, 2015, p. 65). Challenging this stipulation of Gordon’s could be fruitful ground for students to explore further, as close listenings of recordings such as those by Lehmann, Brandt, and Winkelmann hopefully demonstrate that if more scholars challenge their habitus of listening, which constitute “embodied pattern of action and reaction… tacit, unexamined, seemingly completely ‘natural’” (Cheng, 2019, p. 22), we may be able to incline our ears more towards the “grain” of musicians whose techniques lay outside the bounds of high-fidelity audio recording.

Hopefully, this paper has demonstrated that “It’s Not About the Cut” and articles like it that shed light on the role materiality plays in mediating audience reactions to musical subjectivity could provide great fodder for students to ground these discussions in a broader historical context. Additionally, by exploring this subject further, students could engage in an attentive-but-materially-oriented rather than structural listening, which, despite her dismissal of Moreschi’s recordings, achieves a listening habitus that Gordon advocates on a metaphorical level in the context of musical research, as it would similarly buck what she rightly observes as the antiquated notion that the only meaningful form of musical inquiry has to stem from an abstracted, “rational understanding based on some kind of knowledge of musical structure” (Hesmondhalgh, 2021, p. 13).

Works Cited

Broschi, R. (1734). Artaserse: Son qual nave. https://vmirror.imslp.org/files/imglnks/usimg/3/3c/IMSLP339709-PMLP258889--03-_Aria.pdf 

Cheng, W. (2019). Misjudgments of Humanity. In Loving Music Till it Hurts (pp. 11-32). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190620134.003.0002 

Davies, J. Q. (2014).Veluti in Speculum. Romantic Anatomies of Performance (pp. 13-40). The University of California Press. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=1650801&pq-origsite=primo

Donizetti, G. (1833). Lucrezia Borgia: Trinklied. [Performed by Marianne Brandt & Unidentified Pianist]. (1905). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wq3oeKmyH28

Feldman, M. (2015). Red Hot Voice. In The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds (pp. 79-132). University of California Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt13x1hwq.8

Gordon, B. (2015). It’s Not About the Cut: The Castrato’s Instrumentalized Song. New Literary History, 46(4), 647–667. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24772763 

Heller, W. (2005). Varieties of Masculinity: Trajectories of the Castrato from the Seventeenth Century. British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 28, 307-321. https://wendy-heller.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/castrato.pdf

Hesmondhalgh, D. (2021). Streaming’s Effects on Music Culture: Old Anxieties and New Simplifications. Cultural Sociology, 16(1), 3-24. https://doi.org/10.1177/17499755211019974

Mancini, G. (1912). Practical Reflections on the Figurative Art of Singing (P. Buzzi, Trans.). Gorham Press. https://s9.imslp.org/files/imglnks/usimg/c/c8/IMSLP27746-PMLP61168-Mancini_-_Practical_Reflections_on_the_Figurative_Art_of_Singing.pdf (Original work published 1776)

Masters, G. (2024). Mimetic Mechanicity: The Iron Foundry and Vernacular Internationalism in the 1930s. Twentieth-Century Music, 21(1), 74–109. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1478572222000433 

McMurray, P., & Mukhopadhyay, P. (2024). Introduction: Imperial Sounds, c. 1797. In Acoustics of Empire: Sound, Media, and Power in the Long Nineteenth Century (pp. 1–34). Oxford University Press. https://directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.500.12854/142399

Mozart, W.A. (1782). Die Entführung aus dem Serail: Martern aller Arten. [Recorded by Lilli Lehmann & Unidentified Conductor/Orchestra]. (1907). https://archive.org/details/02-lilli-lehmann-fidelio-co-384 

Porpora, N. (1735). Polifemo: Alto Giove. https://vmirror.imslp.org/files/imglnks/usimg/4/45/IMSLP687385-PMLP402681-D1424-4_001-converted-compressed.pdf 

Sucher, J. (1867). Liebesglück. [Recorded by Hermann Winkelmann & Unidentified Pianist]. (1906). https://archive.org/details/78_liebesgluck_113_12