Picture 1 of 1

Stock photo

Voice Machines : The Castrato, the Cat Piano, and Other Strange Sounds, Hardc... - Picture 1 of 1

Voice Machines : The Castrato, the Cat Piano, and Other Strange Sounds by Bonnie Gordon (2023, Hardcover)

Great Book Prices Store (341992)

96.8% positive feedback

Price:

$54.97

Free shipping

Estimated delivery Sat, Sep 6 - Fri, Sep 12

Returns:

14 days returns. Buyer pays for return shipping. If you use an eBay shipping label, it will be deducted from your refund amount.

Condition:

Brand New

About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press

ISBN-100226825140

ISBN-139780226825144

eBay Product ID (ePID)15058363839

Product Key Features

Number of Pages432 Pages

LanguageEnglish

Publication NameVoice Machines : the Castrato, the Cat Piano, and Other Strange Sounds

SubjectHistory & Criticism, Modern / General, History

Publication Year2023

TypeTextbook

AuthorBonnie Gordon

Subject AreaMusic, Science, History

FormatHardcover

Dimensions

Item Height1.3 in

Item Weight25 Oz

Item Length9 in

Item Width6 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceScholarly & Professional

LCCN2022-039099

Dewey Edition23

ReviewsIn Gordon's vivid prose, the castrato becomes a figure that maneuvers European music history and its colonial and racial violences. . . For a text that deals with inaudible bodies, there is a lot of sound., Gordon explores the castrato as a cultural phenomenon and a critical mode of inquiry into the technological relationships that have existed between humans, machines, sounds, and instruments, from early modern to contemporary times. . . [A] gorgeously sweeping, multidisciplinary book that is equal parts historical and visionary., Voice Machines is a terrific book. Gordon doesn't hold back, using the figure of the castrato to rethink the history of sound reproduction, organology tout court , the naive claims of sound studies and posthumanism, histories of the South, conceits of sex, and what it means to be human. The history of the machine, like the history of the human, is complex. And it is this complexity, as much as the complexity of the sound world of early modern Europe, that jostles for our attention on every page. An epistemological pickle, the castrato was also a figure who, perfected through surgery, enhanced sensory knowledge and extended physical nature by, for example, transubstantiating matters like air or breath into others, like voice. The sound of that voice becomes newly visceral and material in these pages., Every so often a book appears after decades of historical spadework and deep thinking. Voice Machines is that book. Gordon's vivid imagination and her analytical skill at suturing the smallest details to the largest conceptual understandings gleam on every page. With bracing lucidity, she builds her histories brick by brick from long-lost archives while also intuiting powerful meanings from present-day politics and artefacts. That double motion enables her canny reflections on voice, body, technology, race, the machinic, the postcolonial, and the posthuman to lead to a reimagining of castrato history. The upshot is something of a miracle. Voice Machines gives us a radically new argument, delivered with estimable intellectual power, wit, and verve, about the stakes of musical bodies as machinic assemblages., Gordon offers a unique perspective on castrati, the vocal acrobats who enhanced the sensory delight of baroque opera audiences. . . Particularly focusing on the relationship of music and technology, Gordon moves back and forth through history. . . .Based on decades of research, Voice Machines poses fascinating questions about the voice, music, technology, and humanity., The question of the morality of alterations to the body concerning sex and gender is once again at the forefront of right-wing political organizing. Gordon is undistracted by the transphobic explosion in contemporary politics, confining herself to the merest gestures toward the Supreme Court and other implications for the present day--she always centers the music. And yet, her argument is undeniably topical: Voice Machines insists that individual people with bodies relate and respond to the creative cultures around them, as well as to each other, ungovernably. Resisting a closure that would be false, she lets the reader hear the harmony and name it for themselves.

IllustratedYes

Dewey Decimal782.86

Table Of ContentList of Illustrations Note to the Reader Prologue Sounds like . . . Assembling the Sound World 1 Orfobot: Automated Orpheus 2 The Death of a Cicada Feedback Loops: Entanglements of Voices and Instruments Intermedio: The Cat Piano 3 Organoscope: Telescoping Sound 4 Organs and Organs 5 Into the Garden Roman Reverb and Sea Changes 6 When in Rome: The Castrato as Special Effect 7 On the Cusp 8 More Than One Sex Out of Synch 9 Time Travel / Liquid Ecstatics 10 Cyborg Echoes Epilogue: Cadential Hauntings Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

SynopsisAn 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.

LC Classification NumberML1433.G67 2023