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This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1986.
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...
A fascinating insight into the life and music-making of the most documented musician of the seventeenth century, castrato Atto Melani.
This book highlights the experiences of castrato singers in Britain during the long eighteenth-century. These singers stood apart from traditional cultural and sexual norms of the period by nature of their altered bodies. The work investigates the fears surrounding the possibility of Catholic influence in the nation, and the ability of sensual Italian operatic music to feminize the male population and weaken the country’s leaders. The castrato as a possible romantic rival to “normal” men is also discussed, while the contributions of the castrati to cultural leadership in the areas of teaching, concert direction and social influence are examined. This book will appeal to music historians and those interested in cultural and gender studies.
Implements stories of surgical alteration to consider how early modern individuals conceived the relationship between body, mind, and self.
Objects we traditionally regard as "mere" imitations of the human—dolls, automata, puppets—proliferated in eighteenth-century England's rapidly expanding market culture. During the same period, there arose a literary genre called "the novel" that turned the experience of life into a narrated object of psychological plausibility. Park makes a bold intervention in histories of the rise of the novel by arguing that the material objects abounding in eighteenth-century England's consumer markets worked in conjunction with the novel, itself a commodity fetish, as vital tools for fashioning the modern self. As it constructs a history for the psychology of objects, The Self and It revises a story that others have viewed as originating later: in an age of Enlightenment, things have the power to move, affect people's lives, and most of all, enable a fictional genre of selfhood. The book demonstrates just how much the modern psyche—and its thrilling projections of "artificial life"—derive from the formation of the early novel, and the reciprocal activity between made things and invented identities that underlie it.
Gaetano Donizetti: A Research and Information Guide offers an annotated reference guide to the life and works of this important Italian opera composer. The book opens with a complete chronology of Donizetti's life (1797-1848) and career, relating it to contemporary events. The balance of the book details secondary resources and other works, including general sources, catalogs, correspondence, biographical sources, critical works; production/review sources, singers and theaters, and the individual operas.
Prostate cancer will strike 200,000 American men this year. Now, a surviving cancer patient and his urologist provide not just a physician's overview of the disease, but a compassionate guide by someone who's lived with it. Meyer and Nash's advice will empower patients to affect the outcome of the disease.