The Castrato Meets the Cyborg

Bonnie Gordon

The Opera Quarterly, Volume 27, Number 1, Winter 2011, pp. 94-121 (Article) Published by Oxford University Press

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The Castrato Meets the Cyborg

n bonnie gordon o university of virginia

The beginning of the 1630s did not go well for the Barberinis. They suffered through a plague, a war, and a lot of bad press generated by their successful prosecution of Galileo as a heretic. When Prince Alexander Charles Vasa of Poland came to visit in early 1634, they took the opportunity to engage in some earlymodern damage control. The grand procession, an opera, and a theatrical joust left no room to question their greatness. One evening, as part of these events, the soprano castrato Marc Antonio Pasqualini entered the house of a Barberini relation on a chariot that was drawn by a giant metallic eagle and moved above four golden wheels.1 Dressed as Fame, he wore an elaborate costume of gold thread and sang to the audience with a voice created by surgery and years of training (fig. 1). Pasqualinis entrance serves as my point of departure for exploring the boundary between humans and machines in early modern Italy. I will argue for a resonance between castrati and machinesa resonance that insists that boundaries between humans and machines have always been porous. The altered bodies of the castrati existed within a long-standing tension between the organic and the human made. In the seventeenth century that tension created a ripe climate for manufactured singers, one that is still relevant today. Admitting that relevance should teach us something about the dangers of reading the past in terms of our own historical period. It can also reveal the productively defamiliarizing possibilities of reading the castrato as an early hallmark of, and indeed entirely related to, our current experience of ( post)modernity. Focusing on Pasqualini and his chariot helps us see castrati outside the operatic and ecclesiastical contexts in which scholars most often consider them. To be sure, at their height they existed within the operatic world and were products of that potent institution. But, considering them in spectacles like the Barberinis and alongside early modern technologies allows for new understandings of the peculiar reasons why these altered men played such an important role in music making for nearly two hundred years, and why, in particular, this was so in seventeenth-century Rome when the Barberini family dominated cultural life.
The Opera Quarterly Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 94122; doi: 10.1093/oq/kbr015 Advance Access publication on September 7, 2011 The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

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Figure 1 Pasqualini as Fame, engraving by Francois Colllignon, Festa, fatta in Roma (Rome, 1635). This image is only available in print due to restrictions from the rights holder.

To judge from the descriptions in primary sources, as well as the invaluable archival work of Margaret Murata and Frederick Hammond on Barberini Rome, baroque Rome was a space of barely controlled chaos.2 A variety of eventsfrom fireworks to operas with onstage fountains and flying cloudsmixed illusion, machinery, magic, and music. There were animate and inanimate objects; actors and animals; clamorous events with trumpets, drums, screaming, shooting, and other noises. Within this environment of sensory overload, at certain moments the visual and the aural coalesced, and the castratos voice acted not just as a musical effect, but also as a special effect. Spectators of these events lived in a world in which mechanical philosophy was emerging, but earlier magical sensibilities still echoed. They experienced the castrato as a kind of human machine, a variation among other wondrous objects created by technological attempts to manipulate and supplement natural materials. Castrati were mechanized to produce sounds in ways that unmechanized bodies could not. If, as Jonathan Sawday and others claim, anatomy theaters and public autopsies played on the conceit of the body as a machine, then operas and spectacles used the castrato as both a machine and a malleable object.3 Castrati and machines did not register as identical; everyone could tell the difference between a mechanical singing bird and an altered man singing an aria. Likewise, we in the twenty-first century can distinguish between the Terminator and the former governor of California. But the distinction between constructed singers and machines was by no means absolute in the seventeenth century. The shared

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quality of quasi-magical instrumentality between our time and theirs can help us understand how and why castrati functioned in the seventeenth century and how, more generally, their liminality challenges some of our current conceptions of early modern thought. I read this process of body alteration through the lens of cyborg theory, arguing for an early modern techno-culture that centers not on computers, wires, and sockets, but on hydraulics, motion, force, and theatrical illusions. Even without electronic enhancement, Pasqualini and others like him inhabited the fluid bodily and ontological states that Donna Haraway has so persuasively identified in the postmodern era. Castrati performed the cultural work of cyborgs by challenging the boundaries of the human. We in the twenty-first century have our techno-culture, but early modern Europeans had theirs, too.4 At the same time, William Gibsons famous description of cyberspace as consensual hallucination might apply to both past and present. How better to describe the spectacular seventeenth-century performances that transformed city spaces into raging floods and regularly sent gods floating away on cloud machines that moved along vertical tracks operated by winches?5 Its important in attempting to understand the castrato to escape from our contemporary insistence that these extraordinary men were only victims of a barbaric practice. Such a presentist assumption has often steered modern scholars toward obsessing about why audiences tolerated mutilated men in their high-art operas. Contemporary scholars have tended rightly to focus on changing attitudes toward gender that made the castratos presence in music making acceptable until sometime at the end of the eighteenth century, when it began to seem horrifying. The changes relate both to the increasing association of high voices with female roles and to the rise of enlightenment philosophies that raised cultural consciousness about human rights and individual choice. Indeed to our modern sensibilities, trapped in a Freudian world, what stands out is the genital mutilation, not the emphatic voice. But recall that mutilation was not uncommon in the early modern period, nor is it now. Stories of castrati wounded at young ages for the sake of their art are hard for us to take. They make the singers seem so disempowered, so without agencyobjects traded about with little or no regard for their individual human subjectivity. To put this in perspective, the seventeenth century was an age in which bodies of all sorts were trafficked and mutilated. Fathers regularly gave away daughters in marriage to men older than themselves, and the Italians had their own active slave trade and culture of human bondage. Indeed, we ought not to be so smug about our own raised consciousness; we have our own mutilation and traffic in bodies. I am thinking of both the global trade in human bodies and of athletes, models, and musicians who work their bodies to the point of mutilation every day.

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The Castrato in Seventeenth-Century Rome

Seventeenth-century Rome was the capital of a powerful state, a hub for daring and lucrative business ventures, and a site of numerous magnificent courts. It served as headquarters of the Roman Catholic drive to regain religious and cultural control over Europe and was a focal point for information garnered by missionaries exploring lands outside of Europe. Yet even as Romes intellectual world reached toward baroque ingenuity, the capital was still dominated by Renaissance Neoplatonism and the classical thought generally associated with the previous century. The castrato stands as a sort of poster boy for seventeenth-century Romes theatrical, musical, and mechanical culture. In this theater of the world, castrati participated in almost every aspect of sacred and secular ritual, often standing alongside a variety of ingenious artifices designed to ravish the senses. The productions in which castrati appeared frequently juxtaposed them with other fabulous creations. The joust that gave Pasqualini pride of place as Fame, for example, also featured the Barberini dwarf, elaborate carriages, and light shows. To move even beyond Rome, the century that witnessed a growing delight in the castratos voice also saw an increasing enchantment with moving artificial figures, fireworks, fountains that spat out rushing water, and talking statues. As singers increased the capabilities of their voices to delight and incite wonder, so too did engineers and stage designers increase their ability to create wondrous artificial figures and devices.6 In the same year that Pasqualini performed as Fame, Athanasius Kircher, the famous German Jesuit polymath, arrived in Rome.7 Kircher plays a non trivial role in this story because the emphasis in his writings on the rare, marvelous, and paradoxical epitomizes the interests of most educated Europeans of his time and intersects with the cultural forces that allowed castrati to flourish. Seventeenth-century visitors to his museum at the Jesuit Collegio Romano, which he called a theater of art and nature, encountered displays of rare artifacts and performances of all kinds.8 The years of Pasqualinis reign in Rome also coincide with an important moment in the history of the solo singing voice. By the 1630s, when the Venetian Republic first institutionalized public opera, the fees earned by high-voiced singers in leading roles generally exceeded those of tenors and basses. This trend began at the end of the sixteenth century when the high voice had become a hot commodity. In most of Italy, however, and especially in Rome, the female voices that could produce those sounds came with a presumed lasciviousness from which popes and cardinals felt they had to distance themselves. Such an avoidance of the females erotic appeal points to the peculiar situation of the Italian castrato. Although Byzantine, Greek, Roman, Chinese, and Islamic traditions

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employed men with altered genitals in sacred and secular rituals, only Italians developed and refined the process of training castrato voices, placing these made performers at the center of their music making. Italian courts and churches hired the earliest castrati because they came with high voices without problematic female bodies and because their power and longevity made them more practical than boy sopranos. The papal chapel recruited the first from Spain in the early 1560s, though they were by no means the only ones doing it. These sixteenth-century castrati were neither any more virtuosic than other singers nor predisposed to execute vocal pyrotechnics that exceeded the glottal effects used by all singers. However, by the middle of the seventeenth century this had begun to change, and singers like Pasqualini were constructed, acquired, and trained for the purpose of doing special performances. Listeners increasingly heard and understood castrati as exceptional. In Rome, by 1625, Pope Urban VIII declared the Cappella Pontificia at full strength with nine male sopranos and nine male altos. Barberini castrati also participated in a secular ensemble that included harp, lute, harpsichord, percussion, winds, and violins. When Urban went on vacation to the Castel Gandolfo, he never traveled without two trumpet players and a group of castrati virtuosi.9 Cardinal Alessandro Peretti Montalto and Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte among others also retained castrati in their households and paid for their training.10 Thanks in part to these active cardinals, Rome constituted a focal point for the castrato trade. Castrati produced there were traffickedlike books, objects and theoretical treatises. Young castrati often went to Rome for training in written and improvised music, while dignitaries from other Italian courts looked to Rome to fulfill their singing needs. Pasqualinis career exemplifies the ways in which the Barberinis privileged their prized singers. In 1631, Cardinal Antonio Barberini secured a place for him in the Sistine Chapel choir and procured him a benefice at Santa Maria Maggiore. When the singers carriage met with bullet fire in 1637, the cardinal offered six hundred scudi for information (no small sum!) and then apparently tried to lock the singer up for safekeeping. Pasqualini was excused from the choir because he had been kept in his rooms by order of Sig. Cardinal Antonio for a certain tiresome incident.11 Pasqualini killed a servant the following year, but suffered no repercussions other than temporary exile. In 1641, Pasqualini accompanied the cardinals court to sing in Rossis Orfeo. Again, his presence served to elevate the cardinals court in the eyes of the French.

Resounding Bodies
The events celebrating the 1634 visit of the Polish prince to the house of Barberini centered on the joust, the details of which appear in two paintings.

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Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio, the brother of Enzio Bentivoglio, who directed the spectacle, also produced a fabulous festival book.12 The book alone cost over six hundred scudi (the price set on the head of Pasqualinis shooter) and stood as a dramatic printed performance of Barberini greatness. An illustration of Pasqualinis performance as the goddess Fame was positioned in a prized place, and the text describes the castratos impact as a special effect (fig. 1).
Fame presented herself at the center of the room, where the ladies and noblemen had assembled themselves, on a lovely chariot which was drawn by a great eagle and moved above four golden wheels. The body of the cart was subdivided by many carvings adorned with leaves and golden decorations which stood out even more against the green background. But from the body of the same chariot over two harpies of silver rose the seat of Fame which was also supported from behind by a giant silver harpy. One went up to the said seat through two silver steps all worked with several arabesques and carvings[,] and on the extreme edge of the surface where the eagle had the ropes to pull it two lovely silver vases adorned the floor of the chariot. Fame, who sat majestically on top of it, appeared then sumptuously dressed, and her dress, which was woven with many colors and gold[,] was also studded with a multitude of eyes, mouths, and ears. She held a golden trumpet in her hand and on her shoulders she unfolded two wings which were also full of eyes, ears and mouths. The Chariot stopped when it was necessary and while the people were waiting to hear what Fame would bring, she was accompanied by a harmonious consort of instruments and in these notes with a very sweet song explained the reason for her arrival.13

Pasqualinis appearance as Fame was just one of many instances in which humans functioned as special effects and in which their alliances with both machines and the natural came to the forefront. Fames wings, and those of the eagles drawing her chariot, evince the animal, while the wheels, which powered machines and populated machine books, stand as artifacts of human industry. Even in early modern Italy, the wheel was understood as a primary marker of human technology and was used to move everything from the chariots that carted popes through processions to water that powered hydraulic machines. The silver harpies that carry Fames seathalf woman, half birdare themselves liminal creatures. Fame wields a golden military trumpet and bears responsibility for upholding the power of her patrons. The metallic sheen of Pasqualinis costume further enhances his image as a constructed instrument, built, like the trumpet, through a human process. The multiple eyes and ears suggest a human body reduced to its component parts and reconstructed. At the same time, Fames costume and performance here contain within them echoes of ancient mythological stories and the sound phenomena that went with them. Pasqualinis costume nearly exactly re-creates Virgils description of Fame, in which she spreads her terrible wings, and each of her many eyes comes

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with a tongue, a voice, and an ear. Allusions to Virgils Fame appeared in visual art, poetry, and musical entertainments throughout Renaissance and baroque Rome, and would have been familiar to many viewers. Virgils Fame repeats everything, first in a whisper to a few, and then louder and stronger with each breath:
Pinioned, with An eye beneath for every body feather, And, strange to say, as many tongues and buzzing Mouths as eyes, as many pricked-up ears, By night she flies between the earth and heaven Shrieking through darkness, and she never turns Her eye-lids down to sleep.14

Already in this Latin context Fame acts as a resonant body, as a sound carrier whose voice and noises far exceed her body. She is a reverberation whose sound is reflected so many times that no single source voice remains. The original body is in the end lost. The performative realization of the literary precursor highlights a body that is comprised of fragments. Fame in other words is already a musical instrument of resonance. Pasqualinis costume also recalls Ovids description of Fames home, built of echoing brass.15 Pasqualinis voice on the figure of Fame may well have created an especially resonant body: an altered voice heralding an important event, on a musical machine representing an already superhuman sound. Resonance, when the vibration of one object causes another to vibrate with it, occurs widely in nature but is also re-created with natural, semi-natural, and artificial devices. Fame was herself a kind of acoustic effect, an animate amplification. As Fame, Pasqualini also then became a kind of acoustic effect that further served as a literal mouthpiece for the Barberinis, singing with a harmonious concert of instruments as she announced her own arrival. She had arrived from on high to call the audience to order. While the score has been lost, we have the words Pasqualini sang upon his entrance. As Frederick Hammond points out, the alternation of seven- and eleven-syllable lines suggests a Monteverdi-esque prologue.16

Io che sol fr le bocche, Invisibile altrui, S le lingue mortali V dispiegando lali Qui vengo, e col sembiante Quella sar io, sonio che le grandalme, e lopre

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Ignote al cieco Mondo F note, e col mio volo E termine al lor grido il Mare, el Polo. I, who only in the mouths (am) invisible to others, spread my wings on the mortal tongues, (I) come here. I will be the one who makes known the great souls and the works unknown to the blind World (and with my flight . . .) The sea and the earth will end their cry for help.17

Sixteen years after Pasqualinis appearance as Fame, Jean Royeur arrived in Rome and promptly treated audiences to feats that called into question his status as a mere human. Royeur performed his trick in the Piazza Navona, but by 1650 the Fountain of the Four Rivers, created by the sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini, had turned the piazza into a permanent theater. The fountain itself enraptured audiences with its natural-looking figures and was unveiled with a parade led by none other than the goddess Fame herself. As ingenious hydraulic machinery pushed water though an opening between large man-made rocks, the human fountain Royeur performed his own astounding feats. He ingested water and, through an invisible force, turned it into a variety of other liquids. After consuming large quantities of plain water, according to a description by Kirchers assistant Kaspar Schott, he began to vomit: from his stomach he presse[d] out twelve or fourteen perfumed waters of different colors, most perfect liquors, wine alight with flame, and oil burning without wick, lettuces and flowers of all kinds, with full and fresh petals. He also exhibit[ed] a fountain by projecting water out of his mouth into the air for the space of two Misereres.18 Exploiting the blurred relationship between the organic and the man-made, he did the work of a machine and, in effect, became a work of art. Schott made this connection clear by drawing a direct parallel between Royeur and the stone fountain.19 Royeurs liminal position was made explicit by Kircher, who attempted to determine just where to place Royeur on the continuum between organic and material. Royeurs performance in the shadow of the fountain drew his attention, and he and his assistant, Schott, set out to prove that Royeurs talent involved the manipulation of natural causes rather than the work of some intervention, demonic or otherwise. The puking Frenchman eventually appeared in Schotts

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encyclopedic Mechanica Hydraulico-Pneumatica as Machina VIII, alongside other incontinent hydraulic machines. The years in which Royeur and Pasqualini were active in Rome were ones in which Romans nurtured a fascination with what we would call machine culture and with the new technology of devices that extended and replicated human processes. This move toward machines goes back to the sixteenth century. Giambattista Aleotti, for instance, published a translation of Heron of Alexandria in 1589 that explained in detail how to make machines, and it served as a model for the costly machine books that were all the rage at the turn of the seventeenth century.20 In Rome during the middle of the seventeenth century, Kircher worked in print and in person to display machines created by human ingenuity and powered by some force of nature, air, or water to incite wonder and pleasure in spectators. These devices, like the castrato, existed in a performative context for the amusement of princes. Visitors to the museum at the Jesuit Collegio Romano might have encountered the regurgitating Frenchman near a fabulous hydraulic organ, or a mechanical Jesus walking on water, a machine for the composition of four-part harmony, or a perpetual screw that allowed even the smallest boy to lift a large object. Museums in the early modern period looked very different from the static collections and exhibits that we know today.21 Often called theaters of nature, they were resounding spaces that served as important sites for performance and display. Like the spectacles featuring castrati, they endeavored to inspire wonder in spectators and enhance the cultural capital of their patrons. Naturalists, like musicians, took pride in their ability to amaze. The machines, instruments, and experiments housed within museum walls occupied a space that bordered on the theatrical. Kirchers museum served as an actual theater for ceremonial visits. In 1622, for example, the Collegio Romano sponsored a series of festivities to celebrate the canonization of Saints Ignatius and Francis Xavier, for which the college was turned into a simulacrum of ancient Rome. The college museum itself provided a site for the staging of plays representing events in the lives of Xavier and Ignatius, including an operawith a libretto by the mathematics professor Orazio Grassi and music by Kapsbergerthat featured many castrati and elaborate stage machines.22 Schott made it very clear that he intended the museum to stimulate pleasure and curiosity:
There is, in the much-visited Museum (that we will soon publish in print) of the Most learned and truly famous Author mentioned above, a great abundance of Hydraulic and Pneumatic Machines, that are beheld and admired with enormous delight of their souls by those Princes and literati who rush from all cities and parts of the world to see them, and who hungrily desire to know how they are made.23

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He described Kirchers mechanics as a service to important men, whom Schott said wanted to know the reasons for the construction of Machines, and the causes of the motions of engines. That I might satisfy their desires; I proceeded in this little book, like an anatomist, to teach all the craft of the aforementioned Museum of the Machines, and to relate things taught elsewhere by the same author.24 The original Latin employs the words fabricarum and anatomians, both of which recall contemporary anatomy treatises and serve to bridge the gap between the machines and their human observers. The word anatomy, used here to describe both machines and humans, serves conceptually to link the two. For Schott, the machines aimed to please princes who
derive greater pleasure of their eyes and souls from these things than they might expect profit for their estate. Neither will we be satisfied with delighting only the eyes, we also prepare a feast for the ears, with various self-moving and selfsounding organs and instruments that we will excite to motion and sound only by the flow of water and the stealthy approach of air with no less ease than skill.25

Schott, like his teacher, aimed to delight princes and pleasure their sensorium in all registers. He did so in part through tricks of natural magic. It is a theatrical display that capitalizes on visual illusion and demonstrates the control of art over nature, of man over the human body. Schott goes on to promise readers that he will demonstrate just how to create these effects that, he assures them, can be used to make already powerful princes even more powerful. Outside of the museum, Pasqualini provided the kind of delight Schott discusses by exciting the sensorium in all registers. From his debut in Stefano Landis Il SantAlessio, Pasqualini participated in almost every musical event sponsored by his patron. He had by the 1640s earned the nickname Malagigi, who was cousin to Rinaldo and a secondary magician in Orlando furioso. Odoardo Ceccarelli, puntatore of the Capella Sistina in 1647, ascribed rare powers of creativity to Pasqualini: he was one of the most famous virtuosi in our college, even in all of Christendom. The incomparable artistry and refined elegance of his singing is a result of his own invention, a miracle in this profession in our century.26 The words artistry and invention (artifizio e peregrine) imply the intervention of human effort; they highlight the voice as natural and crafted and the singer as both a creator and the created.

Theatrical Organs and Material Voices

The similarities in the way the singing voice and the hydraulic organ were understood to function highlight the connections between humans and machines in the seventeenth century. I will make analogies between received understandings of the way both instrumentsthe voice and the organsounded and the ways

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both created theatrical spaces of sound. Both kinds of resounding bodies occupied a central place in the spectacular culture of early modern Rome, and both functioned as instruments of reality and fantasy, composed of natural materials that made noise through hydraulic technologies, pumping fluids, and enhanced physicality. Moreover, both varieties of sound machines had a shelf lifecastrati the lifespan of a man and hydraulic organs not much more than fifty years. This renders them essentially tacit to our modern ears, and thus audible only through the traces of history. They are not, in other words, like violins and harpsichords that still exist and can be reconstructed almost exactly. Understanding the perhaps odd juxtaposition of these two kinds of sound machines involves wandering through treatises on singing and the building of organs and on theatrical productions that made use of the castrato and those that featured the organ. This section moves toward a brief mention of the castrato Angelo Ferrotti, who sang the character Magic in the 1642 production of Il palazzo incantato. Late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writings about the organ often brought to the fore its curiously animate nature and its usefulness as a site for exploring the connections between humans and machines.27 One of the most fascinating examples of this embodied language is Gioseffo Zarlinos Sopplimenti musicali. Though it was published in 1588, his work continued to be read through the seventeenth and eighteenth century along with Giambattista Aleottis and Giambattista della Portas. In Sopplimenti musicali, Zarlino, who made a career out of lambasting artificial music, raised the question of whether the organ ought to be understood as an ancient or modern invention and pursues his answer in a genealogy of the word itself.28 He ultimately came down on the side of artificial, but in the process explained that the name organ emerged not in relation to a particular instrument but because it also suits all of the mechanical instruments which are useful in any arts and sciences through the help of which one can bring any work to the desired ends.29 Organs, in his terms, constitute anything that can change matter or immaterial forces. An organ or a tool is, by this model, both material and immaterial:
The hammer that the goldsmith uses to make nails and the saw that the carpenter uses to cut a plank are called tools or instruments [strumenti di lavoro]. Also money with which we buy the things that are necessary to human life is called a tool. It is not simply the material things which have a permanent form; but those without form [imaterali] such as logic we call tool.30

Ideas and logic thus also count as tools; they have the potential to transform and to purposefully create something new. Zarlino went on to explain that the organ acquired its name because it is constructed in the manner of the human body.

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Therefore I say, that the suggested organ acquired this universal and common name as its own particular name, from a certain excellence of its natural parts which form the voice, which are called the natural instruments. Because [the organ] was constructed in the way of the human body, with the pipes corresponding to the throat, the bellows to the lungs, and the keys to the teeth and the part that sounds to the tongue, and so on with other parts which correspond to the same ones in man. But to tell the truth our Organ[,] for which the material structure is not very old, on the contrary it is rather modern, where the hoods were added; the hoods which from the box that used to contain the water which is called Sommiero give off the air which goes into the pipes like Virtruvio paints it. Before mentioning the place from which it acquired the name of hydraulic the reason can be seen that our organ is not a modern instrument except for with respect to its first form in which the air which now is produced by the hoods is put in the place of the one that was made using water.31

Aleotti, Fabio Colonna, della Porta, and Kircher described more specifically the process that Zarlino theorized. They explained a technique that had been used in Italys iron foundries, using only water, air, and a recording barrel. As flowing water entered a long vertical tube, it mixed with air. When the water flowed out the end, the pressurized air separated to feed the organ pipes, and the water drove a paddlewheel. The wheel in turn drove a large barrel with pins that opened the valves of the pipes that created pitch. Because they seemed to power their own sound, such mechanical organs blurred the line between man and machine. The singing voice was understood to work via a similar process. It was animated by the breath, which supposedly pushed air from the chest through the throat and into the mouth where tongue, lips, and teeth gave it articulation as speech or song. Pitch and volume depended on how swiftly the air moved through. As late as the early eighteenth century, debate still raged about whether the voice functioned primarily as a wind or string instrument. Anton Ferreins 1741 acoustical experiments that settled the matter by revealing the vibrating vocal cords were still a century away.32 As a consequence of the importance of breath, good singing became largely a matter of breath control; the organ similarly depended on controlling the air. For example in his 1602 Le nuove musiche, which described a training method and style of singing,Giulio Caccini insisted that: A man must have a command of breath to give the greater spirit to the increasing and diminishing of the voice, to esclamazione and other passions.33 Reflecting this masterful breath control, castrati earned endless praise for their messa di voce, their ability to place the voice. Caccini, who had used the terms il cresercere e scenare della voce, described the messa di voce as the primary means of mastering tone.34 Singers had to adjust breath support to the change in vocal intensity in order to produce

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a constant pitch and mitigate the natural tendency to strain or push. If a singer tended to go sharp during the crescendo and flat during the decrescendo, breath control allowed for a continuous pitch. Meanwhile, seventeenth-century writings on the human voice presented it as a raw material that, like stone, air, and water, could be shaped and molded. In other words, just as the organ was described in embodied terms, so too was the voice described in material ones. It moved like air but was understood to have substance that could be shaped like stone, wax, or metal. Camillo Maffei, a doctor, philosopher, and musician, made this clear in the Discorso della voce published in 1562, which remained an important document well into the eighteenth century.35 For Maffei, the voice stood as a malleable raw material that a singer could work on and mold. In 1645, Giovanni Vittorio Rossi (better known by his pen name Giano Nicio Eritreo) depended on these ideas in his description of a singer who could move his voice from highest to lowest, passing it through various turns. He could twist and bend it like the softest wax whenever he wished.36 Describing his experimental attempts to build a hydraulic organ, della Porta wrote about a process that mirrors that of the human voice. He described mixing air and water either in the end of a pipe or in his mouth. After many failed attempts, he found a way to create a warbling sound and keep the tune with the instrument by forcing the air from the bellows to bubble in the chest.37
Let there be made a Brass bottomed chest for the organ, wherein the wind must be carried. Let it be half full of water. Let the wind be made by bellows, or some such way that must run through a neck under the waters. But the spirit that breaks forth of the middle of the water is excluded in the empty place. When therefore by touching the keys, the straps of the mouths of the pipes are opened, the trembling wind coming into the pipes makes pleasant trembling sounds, which I have tried and found to be true.38

Some of the effects were quite literally the same. The vibrato effect della Porta wanted to create for the organ was next of kin to the singers tremolo, and the shared emphasis on tremolos from writers on singing and on organs highlights this kinship. By the middle of the seventeenth century, Kircher focused his work on the tremulant, a mechanical device installed on the organs windpipe that rhythmically modulated the airflow to the wind chest and produced a vibrato with an almost constant frequency. In essence it rhythmically opened a breath hole in the windpipe of the organ. Through the seventeenth century, the tremolo comprised perhaps the most basic singing technique. In his treatise for singers, Lodovico Zacconi explained:
The tremolo, that is the tremulous voice, is the true portal to the passaggi and the means of mastering the gorgia; just as the ship is made to move more easily when

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already in motion and the dancer moves better if he is prepared for the leap. This tremolo should be slight and pleasing, for if it is exaggerated and forced, it tires and annoys. Its nature is such, that if used at all, it should always be used since use converts it into habit, for this motion of the voice helps and spontaneously encourages the movement of the gorgia and miraculously facilitates the undertaking of passaggi.39

More than terminological conjunction, the sympathetic relationship between the sounds made by the organ and by the vocal cords implies a similarity of material production and of effect. In other words, the instruments both functioned and affected the listener in similar ways. As premier singers of their day, the castrati were all expected to be masters of an exquisite tremolo. Describing the rigorous training of the castrato students of Virgilio Mazzocchi in 1695, the composer and castrato Giovanni Andrea Angelini Bontempi explained that the Roman schools oblige their pupils every day to employ an hour in singing difficult and uncomfortable things, to acquire experience, another [hour] in exercising the trill, another in passaggi.40 When Monteverdi first heard Pasqualini sing in 1628 at the Farnese-Medici wedding, the young singer had apparently not yet reaped the benefits of such training programs; the composer remarked rather despairingly that he can do little ornaments and something of a trillo, but everything is pronounced with a somewhat muffled voice.41 The fluid boundaries within which both castrati and hydraulic organs were understood made them natural actors in the theatrical space that was early modern Rome, a theatricality that was heightened in both dramatic spectacles and gardens. Kirchers best-known examinations of hydraulic organs focused on the Palazzo del Quirinale and the Villa Aldrovandi at Tivoli, both of which were extraordinarily theatrical. The organs essentially told stories.42 By 1650, both had attracted attention and inspired many written accounts. The organ at Palazzo del Quirinale was built by Luca Biagi in 1598 but elaborated upon by Kircher. It animated a number of automaton figures, including a mechanical representation of the legend in which Pythagoras visits the blacksmiths forge and discovers the laws governing musical pitch (fig. 2). Kirchers illustration anatomized the whole extraordinary machine, showing exactly how the cylinder worked by means of perforations that allowed poles to slip through and open the pipe. The stone figure of Pythagoras suggested the merging of human ingenuity and natural sound. According to the myth, while passing a blacksmiths forge he noticed that the distinct sound of each hammer creates a different but regular pitch; deciding to weigh them, he discovered them to be ratios of one another (fig. 3). Pythagoras roots music in the material and in man-made objects, but still depends on nature. The manipulation of natures materials create sound.

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Figure 2 Hydraulic organ; Kircher, Althanasius, Musurgia Universalis. 1650 ed. (New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1970) p. 346.

Figure 3 Pythagorian Blacksmiths; Kircher, Althanasius, Musurgia Universalis. 1650 ed. (New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1970) p. 346 detail.

The organ at Tivoli, as described by Kircher, was populated by moving creatures that reflected a fascination with animate objects straddling the divide between the organic and mechanical. Crafted from natural materialsair, water,

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and stonetheir actual life force emerged from human ingenuity. The organ featured a grotto in which the satyr Pan played a flute, accompanied by a cuckoos call and a roosters crow. According to Kirchers description, the cuckoo bobbed his head to a two-note call, and the rooster flapped his wings in time.43 Pan sang to the nymphs in an easy scale, and the nymphs and Syrinx answered. The sounds were apparently consonant. The animate characters all displayed their pipes as if announcing their anatomy. The three pipes played in four-part harmony while moving figures delighted the eye; a smaller organ displayed an effigy of Echo. In mythology, Pan, the half-human and half-animal god of rustic music, wanders the hills chasing nymphs and playing his pipeswhich, like the hydraulic organ that displayed this scene, originated in the modification and enhancement of nature. Pan fit together the pipes and joined them with wax, thus enhancing a natural instrument. Appropriately, the organ that featured the figure of Pan merged an ultra-mechanical four-part harmony with the imitation of bird sounds. These organs depended on a kind of artifice that was repeatedly enacted and theorized in theatrical productions. Just to name a few: for Carnival in 1638, Bernini mounted a theatrical representation of an actual flood of the Tiber LInondazione del Teverewhich included the purposeful breaking of a barricade that pushed water furiously onto the stage. When members of the audience got up to run away, another barricade arose out of nowhere and stopped the flood. Rome frequently lit up with fabulous fireworks displays, which, in addition to transmitting emblematic messages, blurred whatever faint lines existed between art and reality. Just three years after the joust, Piazza Navona set the stage for a series of fireworks in honor of the election of Ferdinand III as king of the Romans.44 Berninis 1644 comedy Fontana di Trevi took as its central topic these kinds of effects.45 In this comic satire the character Aldoro, a satiric representation of Salvator Rosa, begged to learn the secrets of the stage machine that had made Grazianothe satirical mouth of Berninifamous. In addition to the usual story of cross-class love conflicts, the play put the business of stage artifice on display, complete with countless moments when the magic of the stage fails to work. In one such scene, the stage appeared overcrowded with carpenters, painters, and other machinists, who worked on the sets. The scene suggested a larger cultural anxiety and the desire that stood behind it: desperation to make the machines work, and faith in their ability to beguile. Bernini, like his voice in the play, was a master of illusion, of creating inventions that fooled the eye and that highlighted the ability of humans to trump nature. After much fuss over clouds that first failed to rise properly and then plopped to the ground, the comic manservant Zanni announced, Oh I see beautiful clouds float through the sky. In truth where there is naturalism there is artifice. Because of this fact the Prince, who is goodness and courtesy itself, in order to see the work of a virtuoso such as

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Mister Graziano, has to have it ordered with such rigor, that it is not derived from nature but from artifice.46 Seventeenth-century naturalism always depended on artifice. The materials of machinery and levies and pulleys created images from nature. The character Ami explained that
the inventiveness, the design, is the magic art through which one can trick the eye so as to surprise [the viewer], and to make a cloud appear on the horizon and have it advance always clear and with a natural motion, and [to make sure that] as it gets gradually closer to the eye it enlarges, appearing bigger. To show the wind rising and transporting it away here and there and then to have it go up, and not to have it come down as the counterweights would have it.47

Luigi Rossis 1642 Il palazzo incantato took on the same issues. Many scholars have argued that it was produced primarily to show off Pasqualinis vocal talents. Based on an episode from Ariostos Orlando Furioso, the production explicitly combined magic and artifice. The cast for opening night included almost every important male singer in Rome. Pasqualini was, of course, among them, playing the heroine Bradamante. The opera began by staging the triumph of stagecraft and magic with a prologue accompanied by an eight-part instrumental ensemble. Music, Painting, and Poetry, each sung by a castrato, argued her particular case as the most powerful of the arts. At the end of the debate, Magic flew in, finished the scene construction, and declared herself the unequivocal winner, disciplining the others along the way. Her effects were new and different, she announced, and her spells would ultimately triumph over all the other arts. And then in a fabulous effect, a magic castle exploded out of nowhere, ready to host the shenanigans to follow.
Here is Magic But even if I arrive near you without you noticing The effects and operas are not new to you anymore because very often your rhymes, your colors, and the singing entertain the souls with pleasant delight. The ultimate feat comes with industrious spells48

But it was the castrato Angelo Ferrotti, not the visual effects, who in the role of Magic gave voice and power to this altering reality. Submerged in artifice, his body reminded the audience that, in the end, the castratos voice retained the supreme power to extend and alter nature. Singing here comes across as a proliferation of simultaneous magical forms. But the voice, as in the material production of Magics song, set enchantment in motion. Song is, in other words, the necessary precondition for magic in the world of this drama. Magic cannot be

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heard without the voice of the castrato. By setting up the castratos voice as the embodiment of magic, the voice of magic created a place for Pasqualini and the others to do their musical thing. Il palazzo incantato is, as Frederick Hammond has said, a singers opera, one that allowed the singing voice to shine through its improbable cast of lamenting and emoting characters.

Early Modern Cyborgs

I want to tie together Pasqualini, the hydraulic organs, and Romes spectacular culture by reading the castratos body through the lens of cyborg theory. This reading offers a different kind of material history of their lost voices and, in so doing, moves away from what I see as the prevailing turn towards presentism in early modern studies. It looks past the squeamishness about castrati in our phallocentric world and sidesteps momentarily our privileged sense of civil rights. It also contradicts the notion that we are the only properly technological era. The world has always had a place for creatures and objects produced by technique, but the techniques and the materials have varied according to time and place. Our fictional cyborgs range from the visibly mechanical to the almost human; think of the Borg from Star Trek or the Six Million Dollar Man, both of whom already seem old-fashioned. And each of these fictional cases has an oddly accelerated shelf life. In order to lay a claim to wonder, the technological aspect of the cyborg needs to be explicitly and recognizably new to postmodern eyes. In this way, cyborgs are not unlike humanoid machines in that they are fetching if and only if they are fresh; when they become dated or old they are promptly disavowed, discarded, or disdained. Furthermore, cyborgs in the realas opposed to fictionalworld tend to use some technology to push and overcome the limits of individual human bodies. I am thinking of interventions like pacemakers that regulate the heart, or laser surgery to fix eyes. In terms of materials associated with cyborgs, these days we think in terms of computers, sockets, and wires. But as N. Katherine Hayles argues, someone can be a cyborg without having sockets or artificial body parts.49 In the early modern world the connections between humans and machines centered on matter, hydraulics, pumping fluids, and enhanced physicality. Force worked on both humans and machines and served as their interface. This view lets us see the cyborg as a lens for understanding particular constructions of the human body, rather than as a historically proscribed term of art. As Jonathan Sawday, Allison Muri, and others have insisted, the impulse to merge man and machinewhatever we mean by those two complex terms arose long before the twentieth century.50 Since prehistoric eras humans have used tools to enhance their relationship with the material world, and since ancient times, people have been designing inanimate objects that walk and talk.

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In the 1490s, Leonardo da Vinci attempted to prove that nature was mechanically uniform and that humans could imitate the natural equipment of flying animals. A bird is an instrument working according to mechanical law, he wrote, which instrument it is in the capacity of man to reproduce.51 He invented several mechanical devices that allowed human legs and arms to produce a birdlike flapping, and connected his devices to animate objects through the animating potential of force. Force is nothing but a spiritual power, an invisible energy which is created and communicated, through violence from without, by animated bodies to inanimate bodies, giving to these the similarity of life, and this life works in a marvelous way, compelling all created things from their places, and changing their shapes.52 While artisans and artists like da Vinci worked in raw materials such as stone and gold, castrati and the surgeons who created them worked with the raw materials of the malleable human body. By the end of the seventeenth century, the human machine would be more fully theorized. Thanks to Descartes, the period is generally understood as the moment when philosophers first defined humans in terms of devices like clocks, perpetual motion machines, and other mechanisms; Descartes also famously imagined the body as a hydraulic system of nerves. Cyborg theory depends on the basic assumption that all matter, whether created by humans or not, exists on a continuum. This idea of the continuity of matter was especially potent in the premodern world in which, as Pamela Smith explains, artisans engaged in an ongoing bodily struggle against matter, which they had to come to know and master through experience.53 Using slightly different terms, Caroline Bynum points out that all matter was understood as malleable and pregnant with creative potential.54 The actual materials used in any creative process had spiritual properties. For instance, in his writings on hydraulic machines discussed above, della Porta claimed that the phenomenal powers of music to lead men into battle and calm beasts were as much about the materials of the instruments as about the sounds themselves. When I think it is not against reason that the same may be done by the lute or harp alone, but what is done by art or cunning, is more to be wondered at, which none can deny. But if we seek out the causes of this, we shall not ascribe it to the Music but to the instrument, the Wood they are made of, and to the skins. Since the properties of dead beasts are preserved in these parts and of trees cut up in their wood.55 The expressive power lay not in the abstract and immaterial sounds, but in the very material wood and skins that comprised the sound-making instruments. He explains that because bears hate horses, a drum made with horse skin will scare away a bear: A Horse, that is a creature made obedient to man, has capital hatred with a Bear, that is a beast hurtful to man. He will know his enemy that he never saw before and presently prove himself to fight with him, and he uses

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art rather than strength for it. And I have heard that Bears have been driven away in the wilderness by the sound of a drum, when it was made of a Horse skin.56 Because of the danger of snakes and the like, fiddle strings made of serpents can wreak all kinds of havoc: If Fiddle strings be made of Serpents, especially of Vipers, for being put on a Harp and played on, if women with child be present, they suffer Abortion, and Vipers are wont to do as much by meeting them, as many write.57 For della Porta, the power of sound came from the cunning mobilization and modification of a natural material. In the case of castrati, that material was the voice. Despite their employment of castrati, the church had always had problems with the act of castration. Most people handled the procedure itself as a rather unseemly business and avoided the details.58 They liked the voice but preferred to be kept innocent of the surgical operation that made it possible. What little we do know about the production of the castrato voice depends on anecdotes, modern knowledge of hormonal effects, and a few scientific studies of castrated men. What is clear is that the castratos body underwent a two-stage modification, comprised of the surgery, followed by training. I want to rehearse it in brief to show that every element of the castratis training participated in a strategy of recreating their bodies for the purposes of singing. Charles dAncillons 1707 account of the surgery is the most detailed we have. He graphically described the bilateral orchiectomythe removal of both testes which was generally performed between the ages of six and twelve. According to dAncillon, the testicles were either removed through an incision, or withered through a crushing process that severed the ductus deferens.59
The boy five to seven years of age was placed in a hot bath to soften and make supple the parts, making them more tractable. He was given a potent drink, the jugular veins were compressed, and when he became groggy, the organs were snipped out with a knife with scarcely any pain. In the very young, constant compression and rubbing of the tiny gonads were done until they were no longer palpable.60

The procedure had actually been understood since the ancient world, but the vocabularies used to describe the bodily transformations were markedly different from our own. Aristotle made the connection between voice and genitals clear:
When the testes are removed the tautness of the passage is slackened . . . and the source or principle which sets the voice in movement is correspondingly loosened. This then is the cause on account of which castrated animals change over to the female condition both as regards the voice and the rest of the form.61

Valeria Finucci contends that men whose genitals had been damaged to varying degrees were fairly common in early modern Europe. This suggests that medical

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practitioners and philosophers would have had plenty of opportunities to observe the effects of the procedure.62 In addition to voice changes they would have noticed other unique aspects of the altered bodies that visually marked castrati even before they opened their mouths. They had flat feet, never grew beards, had luxuriant hair, tended toward obesity later in life, and developed very long limbs because the growth plates did not close properly. The effects of the operation of course varied; those castrated at earlier ages, for instance, tended to show more feminine attributes and to have higher voices.63 Modern science suggests that the castratis amazing voices and often strange appearances were not simply the result of early surgery. Those alterations set off a series of changes in vocal folds, hormones, and, eventually, whole-body morphology.64 For example, in 1909 the dissected body of a twenty-eight-year-old man who had been castrated at the age of ten revealed a barely visible thyroid gland and a small larynx with vocal cords the length of a coloratura sopranos.65 Women have short, thin vocal cords and men have longer, thicker ones. Partial castration results in shortened vocal cords that produce higher pitches. In unaltered men, the vocal cords increase by almost two-thirds at puberty, and the thyroid cartilage grows markedly, giving rise to the male Adams apple. In those who underwent the procedure, the larynx also failed to descend; its close proximity to the head, along with the short, thin vocal cords, gave castrati voices an extra brilliance. Though da Vinci presented the first anatomically accurate drawings of the vocal cords or foldswhich consist of two infoldings of mucus membranes that stretch across the larynx, vibrating as the lungs expel airthose cords would not be fully understood until the nineteenth century. The impact of hormones would not be explained until the early twentieth century. The castratis voice exemplifies the notion of cyborg as Haraway famously defines it: a fusion of the organic and the technical forged in particular historical, cultural practices.66 I am not positing the castrato as an automaton, an early modern machine that might be understood as the precursor to the robot. Rather, their voices represent an ontological merging of cultural and natural artifacts. Hayless understanding of the post-human helps make this point; in her reading of the postmodern age, the body stands as the original prosthesis, and it is continually modified by its interactions with intelligent machines: The original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born.67 The cyborg as a post-human body placed on a continuum to the computer is, of course, fundamentally of our world. But the castratos voice also artfully enhances the human body and the sensorium and connects the organic body to the technologically produced object. This is reflected in the castratis training, which focused on changing and increasing breath capacity and vocal control. Many of the training techniques

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would have also been used for female singers, as well as tenors and basses, but the implications are different for singers whose bodies have been altered for the purpose of creating a particular kind of voice. And, though the eighteenth century represented the peak of castrato training, earlier singers certainly received similarly intense training. Castrati almost always participated in extensive training while either boarding with their teachers or residing at conservatories. This participation allowed for constant surveillance as they practiced for up to eight hours a day. Since they lost no time to changing voices, they could train continuously from as early as the age of six or seven. Cardinal Francesco Barberinis household included a stable of boy castratiputti musici or castratinitrained in his household at his expense, with compensation paid to their parents. In his much-cited 1695 Historia musica, the castrato and composer Giovanni Andrea Angelini Bontempi describes the rigorous training of the students of Virgilio Mazzocchi, which involved four hours of singing plus other activities:
Another [hour] in the study of letters, and another in the instruction and exercise of singing, both with the teacher listening and before a mirror, to accustom themselves to make no unbecoming motion; neither of the waist, nor of the brow nor of the eyes, nor of the mouth. And all these were the occupation of the morning.68

After lunch, the vigorous protocol continued with half an hour each on theory and counterpoint, followed by an hour of written counterpoint and the study of letters. Students spent the rest of the day practicing the harpsichord or composition. This brought the young castrati up to eight hours a day of training, and their business was not yet done. They completed their regimen with outside exercises in which they
were to go often to sing and to listen to the response of an echo outside Porta Angelica near Monte Mario, to judge ones own [accenti] oneself, going to sing in almost all the music that was performed in the churches of Rome, and observing the styles of singing of the many illustrious singers who flourished in the pontificate of Urban VII; imitating these styles and justifying it to the teacher, when one returned home; then in order to imprint these more firmly in the minds of the students, the necessary explanations were made and the necessary advice was given.69

Bontempis description resembles the programs that Nicola Porpora would prescribe for his students, among them Farinelli, in the next century. The castratis radically constructed voices position these special singers within the muddy space between human and machine that is identified with cyborgs. According to Haraway, cyborgs are not about the Machine and the Human, as if

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such Things and Subjects universally existed. Instead cyborgs are about specific historical machines and people in interactions.70 Haraway explains that
The second leaky distinction is between animal-human (organism) and machine. But basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. They could n0t achieve mans dream, only mock it. They were not man, an author to himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream. To think they were otherwise was paranoid. Now we are not so sure. Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.71

The hydraulic organ, the puking Frenchman, and other such creatures and machines suggest that things were every bit as muddy in the early modern world as they are today. But the terms of that muddiness were fundamentally different and thus perhaps less accessible from our modern vantage point. Cyborg theory tends to assume that the boundaries between subjects and the outside world were radically reconfigured by modern technology. However, the castrato provides just one example of an early modern phenomenon that opened up a space for exercises in instrumentality and machinery and that troubled the relationship between the real and the virtual. The castrato in performance functioned in ways that might productively be read as a kind of virtual reality. Virtual reality is, to quote Gibson again, a kind of consensual and collective hallucination. The voices of castrati represented the means of transportation/hallucination amidst tremendous spectacles. Or perhaps the agents of hallucination were different than anything Gibson had in mind. We use headphones, 3-D goggles, and computer screenseach, in a sense, a host to and a means to accentuate special effects. Early modern viewers and listeners were transported through the magic of stagecraft, which included singing, lighting, and other arts. Theatrical effects like Berninis floods and Pasqualinis personification of Fame used multiple sensory effects to create an altered reality that we need to label as high tech. I opened my essay with the heralding of the Barberinis joust featuring Pasqualini. I am going to end it as the spectacle concluded: with a tremendous boat of musicians gliding through the Piazza Navona (fig. 4). One thousand torches turned the night sky into dawn. Artificial waves camouflaged the low wheels of the boat, underscoring the ability of humans to imitate and extend nature. When a very sweet sound of instruments started, every whisper in the theater ceased immediately and it was soon filled with angelic voices.72 To the sound of music and the four cannons sticking out of the portals, the boat sailed around the square, pausing at the boxes of various dignitaries. At the request of

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Figure 4 The Musicians Boat, Festa, fatta in Roma, (Rome, 1635). This image is only available in print due to restrictions from the rights holder.

the public, the pageant of ships later processed during daylight, causing universal delight. As in most court spectacles, the music that Mascardi described as possessing superhuman grace was itself a special effect. It sounded most powerfully at moments when it assaulted the senses not just aurally, but also visually, in this case through the accompanying spectacle of the brightly lit sky. This concluding parade featured a bevy of liminal creatures, including a strange and monstrous fish plated in gold that sat on the bow of the ship; a siren with a double tail; bacchantes; satyrs; and sixteen fishermen clad in blue robes covered with silver scales, who ran alongside the boat carrying torches. Each of these creatureslike the castrati themselveshad long-held associations with sound, excess, and the limits of humanity. Half-human, half-animal, and in possession of unrestrained passion, satyrs with their ever-present pan pipes had long been associated with a kind of liminal music. Sirens represented dangerously seductive bird women. Juxtaposing these mythological figures with and embodying some of them in the bodies of castrati on elaborate stage machines completely confused the already fluid boundaries between human, animal, and machine. This was an ephemeral experience that temporarily transported the spectators from their world to that of the stage on the piazza. To acknowledge the transformative potential of voices, lanterns, and wheels is to confirm Derridas imperative to move beyond privileging the subjective access to reality. As he suggests, we must move beyond our presentist understandings of the divide between human and machine, natural and artificial, and what is real and what is not. Considering the castrato in this context also suggests that the Derridian critique of presence,

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in which the voice always inhabits a very special place, has not done much to discourage or lessen the presentism that tends to accompany questions regarding cyborgs and the boundary between human and machine. If Derrida has insisted that no experience of material events is fundamentally absolute, it is nevertheless true that most current engagements with post-structuralist thought seem still invested in giving some pride of place to the way we inhabit the world. I dont merely mean to push back the dates of technology and cyborgs to the early modern period. I also want to show that considering the castrato alongside hydraulic organs and lighting effects can push against some essentializing understandings about the voice. There is a notion of authenticity ascribed to the voice that makes it seem to speak, in modern terms, both from immaterial subjectivities and the material bodyit is supposedly the ultimate metaphysical experience. The voice is associated with an experience that often comes across as utterly unmediated. To consider the castratos constructed voice in the context of an early modern cyborg and machine culture is to insist that the voice is not only mediated, but that it is materially constructed. It is once again to assert the voice as a kind of expression that emerges from real flesh and blood. And perhaps more importantly, to see the early modern castrato as a special effect and as a cyborg is to defamiliarize our own moment as well as that of the seventeenth century. It forces us to see both the astonishing virtual realities constructed by early moderns and the all-too-barbaric mutilations of and traffic in human bodies that characterize our world today.

notes Bonnie Gordon is an associate professor in the department of music at the University of Virginia. She is currently at work on a book entitled Voice Machines: The Castrato, the Cat Piano, and Other Strange Sounds. She has also written on Monteverdi, female singersongwriters, and music in Thomas Jeffersons America. Earlier versions of this paper were given at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society (2008); University College Cork, Ireland (2010); American Academy in Rome and Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (2009); New York University (2008). I would like to thank Anna Brickhouse, Jane Barnes Olivia Bloechl, Martha Feldman, Emily Gale, Manuel Lerdau, Richard Wiestreich, and Richard Will for their help with this article. 1. Condotto sopra quattro ruote messe oro. Festa, fatta in Roma alli 25 di Febraio MDCXXXIV (Rome: Vitale Mascardi, 1635), 4. 2. Frederick Hammond, Music and Spectacle in Baroque Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Margaret Murata, Operas for the Papal Court 1631-1668 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981); Maurizio Fagiolo delArco, La festa barocca. Corpus delle festa a Roma (Rome: DeLuca, 1997). 3. Jonathan Sawday, Forms Such as Never Were in Nature, in At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies, and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period, ed. Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert, and S.J. Wiseman (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999). 4. Questioning the relationship between castrati and the limits of humanity from a different perspective, Martha Feldman has considered in her important work on the mythology of the castrato the ways in which these singers called into question boundaries between human and animal. See for example Martha Feldman, Births and Surprising Kin: The

the castrato meets the cyborg Castratos Tale, in Italys Eighteenth Century: Gender and Culture in the Age of the Grand Tour, ed. Paula Findlen, Wendy Wassyng Roworth, and Catherine Sama, afterword by Franco Fido (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). 5. William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 2000), 51. 6. For histories of the castrato see Valeria Finucci, The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration in the Italian Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Roger Freitas, The Eroticism of Emasculation: Confronting the Baroque Body of the Castrato, The Journal of Musicology 20, no. 2 (2003): 196 249; John Rosselli, The Castrati as a Professional Group and a Social Phenomenon, 15501850, Acta Musicologica 60 (1988): 14379; Patrick Barbier, The World of the Castrati: The History of an Extraordinary Operatic Phenomenon, trans. Margaret Crosland (London: Souvenir, 1996); Angus Heriot, The Castrati in Opera (London: Secker and Warburg, 1956); and Richard Sherr, Guglielmo Gonzaga and the Castrati, Renaissance Quarterly 33, no. 1 (1980): 3356. 7. Kircher was a huge influence not just through his presence but through his books, which were printed in large numbers1,500 copies of the Musurgia Universalis aloneand widely distributed through Jesuit channels. In 1652, for example, more than three hundred Jesuits came to Rome from all over the world to elect a new superior general, and each of them went home with a copy of one of these stunning volumes. For more on Kircher and his importance in Rome see David Stolzenberg, ed., The Great Art of Knowing: The Baroque Encyclopedia of Athanasius Kircher (Stanford: Stanford University Libraries, 2001); and Paula Findlen, Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything (New York: Routledge, 2004). 8. On the museum see Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California, 1994); and Eugina Lo Sardo, Athanasius Kircher: il museo del mondo (Rome: Edizioni De Luca, 2001). The literature on the problems with the female voice is vast in and out of musicology. See for example Bonnie Gordon, Monteverdis Unruly Women: The Power of Song in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Suzanne Cusick, There was not one lady who failed to shed a tear, Ariannas Lament and the construction of Modern Womanhood, Early Music 12, no. 1 (1994): 2145; and Wendy Heller, Emblems of Elegance: Opera and Womens Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 9. Hammond, Music and Spectacle, 46. 10. See John Walter Hill, Roman Monody, Cantata, and Opera from the Circles around Cardinal Montalto (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977); and Keith Christiansen, Music and Painting in Cardinal Del Montes Household, Metropolitan Museum Journal 26 (1991): 21327. 11. Hammond, Music and Spectacle, 240. 12. Festa, fatta in Roma; Andrea Sacchi, Joust in Piazza Navonna (Rome: Museo di Roma). 13. Ibid., 4-5. La Famma in un vago Carro, il quale da una grandaquila condotto sopra quattro ruote messe oro, appresentossi nel mezzo della sala, dove erano adunate le Dame, e diversi altri Cavalieri, Si scompartiva il Corpo del Carro in molti scanellamenti adornati con fogliami, e fregi doro, che in campo verde maggiormente spiccavano. Ma dal corpo del medesimo Carro salzava sopra due Arpie dargento il seggio della Fama, il quale pure da un gran Arpa dargento per la parte di dietro veniva sostenuto. Salivasi al detto seggio per due gradi dargento tutti lavorati di varii arabeschi & intagli, e s lestremo del piano, ove laquila haveva I legami per tirarlo, due leggiadri vasi dargento adornavano il pavimento del Carro. La fama, che maestosa sedeva s la sommit di esso comparve poi superbamente vestita, e la sua veste, che di varij colori era tutta con oro tessuta veniva ancora da una moltitudine docchi, di bocche, di orecchie tempestata. Portava una tromba doro in mano, & alle spalle spiegava due ali anchesse ripiene docchi, dorecchie, e di bocche. Fermossi il Carro quando f di bisogno, e mentre si stava aspettando dintendere quello che la Fama fusse per apportare, ella accompagnata con unarmonioso concerto dinstrumenti in queste note con suavissimo canto spieg la cagione della sua venuta. 14. Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 101. 15. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Books IX-XV, trans. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 2:183. 16. Hammond, Music and Spectacle, 215. 17. Festa, fatta in Roma, 6. 18. Kaspar Schott, Mechanica hydraulico-pneumatica dum figuris aneis, et privelegio sacrae Cesare majestatis (Frankfort: Herbipoli, 1657), 31112. Qui stomacho suo deprimit duodecim, quatordecimv diversorum colorum aquas odoriferas, liquores perfectissimos, vinum adustum quod incenditur, oleum saxi quod sine ellychnio comburitur,

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bonnie gordon lictucas, & flores omnis generic, integris & recentissimis foliis. Fontem etiam exhibet projiciendo aquam ex ore in altum per spatium duorum Miserere. 19. Grafton also discusses Royeur in the context of technology and machines. See Anthony Grafton, Magic and Technology in Early Modern Europe (Dibner Library Lecture, Smithsonian, Washington, DC, October 15, 2002). 20. Giambattista Aleotti, Gli artifitosi et curiosi moti spiritali di herone, (Ferrara, Italy: Vittorio Baldini, 1593). 21. Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature. 22. On the various ceremonial visits see Origine del Collegio Romano e suoi progressi, LArchivio della Pontificia Universit Gregoriana 142. This manuscript forms the basis of the descriptions of ceremonial receptions given in the Collegio Romano provided in R. Garcia Villoslada, Storia del Collegio Romano dal suo inizio alli soppressione della compagnia di Ges (Rome: Typis Pontificiae Universitatis Gregorianae, 1954), 26396. On theatrical productions in the Collegio Romano during this time, see Irene Mamczarz, La trattatistica dei Gesuiti e la pratica teatrale al Collegio Romano: Maciej Sarbiewski, Jean Dubreuil e Andrea Pozzo, in I Gesuiti e i primordi del Teatro Barocco in Europa, ed. M. Chiab and F. Doglio (Rome: Centro Studi sul Teatro Medioevale e Rinascimentale, 1995), 34987. See also Jean-Yves Boriaud, La Posie et le thtre latins au Collegio Romano daprs les manuscrits du Fondo Gesuitico de la Bibliothque Nationale Vittorio Emanuele II, Mlanges de lcole Franaise de Roma, Italie et Mediterrane 102, no. 1 (1990): 7796. 23. As cited in Michael John Gorman and Nick Wilding, Technica Curiosa: The Mechanical Marvels of Kaspar Schott (16081666), in La technica curiosa, ed. Michael John Gorman, Paolo Gallazzi, and Nick Wilding (Rome: Edizione dellElefante, 2001), 261. 24. Schott, Mechanica hydraulico-pneumatica, 4. Viri Principales et Litterati, avideque scire desiderant, & Machinarum constructarum rationes, & machinalium motionum causas. Horum desiderio ut satisfacerem, omnium dicti Musei Machinarum fabricam & quasi anatomians edocere, aut alicubi jam ab ipso Auctore edoctam enarrare, brevi opusculo aggressus sum. 25. Schott, Mechanica hydraulico-pneumatica, 5. 26. Alberto Cametti, Musicisti celebri del seicento in Roma: M. A. Pasqualini, Musica doggi 3 (1921): 69. Il Pasqualini era uno dei pi famosi virtuosi del nostro Collegio, anzi di tutta la Cristianit. Ne magnificava cosicos le doti vocali: Lincomparable artifizio e peregrina leggiadria di cantare tratta da sua propia inventione, miracolo in questa professione del nostro secolo. Odoardo Ceccarelli, puntatore de la Capella Sistina 1647. 27. There is extensive literature on hydraulic organs. See for example Patrizio Barbieri, The New Water Organ of the Ville Deste Tivoli, The Organ Yearbook 33 (2004): 3341; Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art, and Technology, trans. Allison Brown (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1995); Robert J. Silverman and Thomas L. Hankins, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); and Patrizio Barbieri, Giambattista Della Portas Singing Hydraulis and Other Expressive Devices for the Organ, Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society 32 (2006): 14566. 28. Gioseffo Zarlino, Sopplimenti musicali (Venice: Francesco dFraneschi, 1588). 29. Ibid., 288. Conviene etianiadeo tutti quelli Istrumenti materiali, che servono qual si voglia Arte Scientia, con laiuto de i quali si pu condurre in quella alcuna opera al desiderato fine. 30. Ibid., 288. Il Martello, che adopera il Fabro nel fare i chiodi, & la Sega, che adopera il Legnaiuolo segare sender lAsse, sono detti Istrumenti. Il Denaro anco, col quale, comperiamo le cose necessarie al vivere humano, detto Istrumento. Et non pur le cose materiali, channo la forma loro permanente ; ma quelle che non hanno cotal forma, com la Logica: diciamo Istrumento. 31. Ibid., 288. Per la qual cosa dico, che lOrgano proposto sacquist questo nome universale & commune dOrgano proprio & particolare, per una certa eccellenza dalle parti naturali, che formano la Voce, che si chiamano Istrumenti naturali: percioche fu fabricato all guisa del Corpo humano, corrispondendo le Canne alla Gola, i Mantici al polmone, i Tasti i Denti, & colui che sona alla Lingua, & cosi laltre parti di esso quella che sono nellHuomo. Ma veramente lOrgano nostro in quanto ad una parte della forma materiale, non molto antico, anzi moderno: percioche sono aggiunti ne i Moderni i Mantici, i quali dalla Cassa che conteneva lAcqua detta hora Sommiero somministrano il Vento, che passa nelle Canne : come nel sudetto luogo dipinge Vitruvio; dal che sacquist il nome di Hidraulica; il perche si pu

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bonnie gordon 58. Giuseppe Gerbino, The Quest for the Soprano Voice: Castrati in Renaissance Italy, Studi Musicali 33, no. 2 (2004). 59. Charles dAncillon, Eunuchism Displayd. Describing All the Different Sorts of EUNUCHS; The Esteem They Have Met with in the World, and How They Came to Be Made So (London: E. Curll, 1718), 14849. 60. Ibid., 37. 61. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. A. L. Peck (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), vol. 1.2, bk. 716, p. 521. 62. Valeria Finucci, The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration in the Italian Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 24849. 63. For a modern medical explanation of these changes see Meyer M. Melicow and Stanford Pulrang, Castrati Choir and Opera Singers, Urology 3, no. 5 (1974): 66370, as well as Enid Rhodes Peschel and Richard E. Peschel, Medicine and Music: The Castrati in Opera, Opera Quarterly 4, no. 4 (1986): 2138. Freitas, in The Eroticism of Emasculation, also assesses the medical literature on this subject. See pages 22628. 64. For details on the procedure see Freitas, The Eroticism of Emasculation; Giuseppe Gerbino, The Quest for the Soprano Voice: Castrati in Renaissance Italy, 30357; and Peschel and Peschel, Medicine and Music: The Castrati in Opera, 2138. 65. Julius Tandler and Siegfried Grosz, ber den Einflu der Kastration auf den Organismus, I. Beschreibung eines Eunuchenskelets, Archiv fr Entwicklungsmechanik der Organismen 27 (1909): 3561. 66. Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Rutledge, 1991), 149. 67. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Post-human (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 3. 68. Bontempi, Historia Musica, 170. Unaltra negli studi delle Lettere; & unaltra negli ammaestramenti & eserciti del Canto, e sotto ludito del Maestro, e davanti ad uno Specchio, per assuesarsi a non far moto alcuno inconueniente, ne di vita, ne du fronte, ne di ciglia, ne di bocca. E tutti que[s]ti erano glimpieghi della mattina. 69. Ibid., 170. Erano landar spesse volte e cantare e sentire la risposta da unEco fuori della Porta Angelica, verso Monte Mario, per farsi giudice da se stessi o depropri accenti, landare a cantar quasi in tutte le Musiche che si saceuano nelle Chiese di Roma; e losseruare le maniere del Canto di tanti Cantori insigni che fiori vano nel Pontificato di Urbano Ottavo; lesercitarsi sopra quelle, & il renderne le ragioni al Maestro, quando si ritornaua a Casa: il quale poi per maggiormente imprimerle nella mente deDiscepoli, vi faceva sopra i necessari discorsi, e ne dava i necessari auuertimenti. 70. Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@ Second_Millenium. FemaleManMeets_ OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Rutledge, 1996), 51. 71. Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto 19394. 72. Vitale Mascardi, Festa, fatta in Roma. Al cominciare dun dolcissimo suono di strumenti cess ad un tratto ogni susurro nel Theatro, il quale ben presto riempissi di angeliche voci.

the castrato meets the cyborg vedere, chel nostro Organo non Istrumento moderno, se non in quanto allalteratione della sua prima forma: percioche il Vento, che hora si fa con i Mantici, posto in luogo di quello, che si facea col mezo dellacqua. 32. Anton Ferrein, Mmoire de lAcadmie royale des Sciences, sance du 15 Novembre 1741 (Paris: 1754). 33. Giulio Caccini, Le nuove musich (1602) ed. H. Wiley Hitchcock, Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era, vol. 9 (Madison, WI: A-R Editions, 1970), 13. 34. Ibid., 13. 35. N. Bridgeman, Giovanni Camillo Maffei et su Lettre sur le Chant, Revue de Musicologie (1956): 1034. Translation modified from Carol MacClintock, Readings in the History of Music in Performance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 47. 36. Giano Nicio Eritreo, Pinacotheca altera II (Amsterdam: 1645), 217. 37. John Baptist Porta, Natural Magick (Magia Naturalis) (Sioux Falls, ND: NuVision Publications, LLC, 2005), 359. Original published as Magia Naturalis. (Naples, Italy, 1558). 38. Baptist Porta. Natural Magick, 359. 39. Lodovico Zaconi, Prattica di musica (Bologna: Forni, 1592), bk. 1, fol. 55, chap. 62, p. 60: tremolo, . . . cioe la voce tremante e la vera porta dintrar dentro a passaggi, & di impataonirse delle gorgie. perche con piu facilitd se ne vi la Naue quando che prima e mossa: che quando nel principio la si vuol mouere. & il saltatore meglio salta, se prima che salta si promoue al salto Questo tremolo deve essere succinto, e vago; perch lingordo e forzato tedia, e fastidisce Ete di natura tale che vsandolo, sempre usarsi deue; accioche luso si conuerti in habito; perche quel continuo mouer di uoce, aiuta. & uolontieri spinge la mossa delle gorgie. & facilita mirabilmente i principij de passaggi. 40. Giovanni Andrea Angelini Bontempi, Historia Musica (Perugia: Costantini, 1695; repr., Geneva: Minkoff, 1976). Le Scuole di Roma obligano i Discepoli ad impiegare ogni giorno unora nel cantar cose difficili e malageuoli, per lacquisto della esperienza; unaltra, nellesercitio del Trillo; unaltra in quello de Passaggi. 41. Margaret Murata, Further Remarks on Pasqualini and the Music of MAP, Analecta Musicologica 19 (1979): 125. Qualque giorgetta et qualque trillo, ma il tutto pronunciato con una certa voce alquanto ottusa. 42. Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia Universalis, 1650 ed. (New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1970), 346. 43. Kircher, Musurgia Universalis, 343. 44. On these multiple events see Maurizio Fagiolo delArco, La Festa Barocca; and Fillipo Clementi, Il carnevale Romano nelle cronache contempraree, 2nd ed. (Rome: 1939). 45. Cesare DOnofrio, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Fontana di Trevi commedia inedita (Rome: Staderini Editore, 1963). 46. Ibid., 60. Zanni: O! belle nuvole vedo andar per aria. Infatt dov naturalezza artifitio. Che ol Prenzipe ch listessa bont, e cortesia per veder lopera dun virtuos com l ol sior Gratian, habbia da farghela comandar con tant rigor, non lh del natural, gh artifizio [sic]. 47. Ibid., 74. Linzegn, el desegn, lArte Mazica per mezz dei quali sarriva ingannar la vista in modo da fere stupier, e di fere spiccar una nuvola dallorizzonte e venir inanz sempre spiccada con un moto naturel, e a man, a man che la savvizina alla vista dilatandose apparir pi grand. Mostrer che l vento lazisi e la trasporti via in z, e in l e poi, se ne vada in s, e non calarla z comuod fan i contrapis. 48. Eccovi la Maga. Ma se ignota pur giungo a voi dappresso, Nuovi gi non vi son gli effetti, e lopre, Ch sogliono ben spesso Le vostre rime, i color vostri, e l canto Lalme ingannar con dilettoso incanto Ddramma di Giulio Rospigliosi che fu poi Papa Clemente IX, MS 633, Biblioteca Corsiniana, Rome. 49. N. Katherine Hayles, The Condition of Virtuality, in Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production, ed. Peter Stallybrass, Nancy Vickers, and Jeffrey Masten (New York: Rutledge, 1997), 201. 50. Jonathan Sawday, Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (London: Routledge, 2007). 51. Irma A. Richter, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 104. 52. Leonardo da Vinci, Notebooks, ed. Irma A. Richter and Thereza Wells, preface by Martin Kemp (Oxford University Press, 2008), 60. 53. Pamela Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 15. 54. Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 256. 55. della Porta, Magia Naturalis, 371. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid.

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