The analogy to football players is insightful, but I can’t be the only one who got to “Lessons and Speculations” expecting *some* mention of the ways this history does-or-does-not bear on the practice of giving sterilizing cross-sex hormones to children. I feel almost baited.
True! Hey, at least it is there... The discussion could go in a very wide set of directions (particularly if one includes adult body modifications). From all the things athletes (not just in football) do, to variations on birth control, to laser vision correction, to bariatric surgery, to all the other options briefly cited in SlimeMoldTimeMold's quote.
What else is there to be said? The article was about body modification in the service of entertainment and profit, not just about body modification in general. So the football analogy fits, whereas trans hormone treatment really doesn't, since it's not something that happens as part of an active effort to create unnaturally talented entertainers.
Re the profit case - The "court mage" speculation is interesting... My impression was that nootropics are not powerful enough / predictable enough / selective enough to make this plausible in the near term. I think it be another analogous case, if it were technically feasible.
The issue with trying to boost people's *intelligence* for exploitative purposes - as opposed to exploiting their singing abilities or athletic talent - is that intelligent people are both more likely to realize they're being exploited and more capable of doing something about it. The situation you're describing would probably not end well for the elites hoping to profit off an army of exploited geniuses: More likely, the geniuses would end up exploiting those elites instead, pretending to be brilliant-yet-humble servants while actually turning the resources of their elite masters toward their own ends. Or they'd simply rise up and overthrow the elites outright. The elites could try to retain control through ideology, or religion, or an engineered drug addiction that keeps their genius-slaves dependent on them, or implanted cortex bombs, maybe just good old-fashioned shackles, but I don't imagine any of those things will be effective for long when dealing with people who have literally superhuman levels of intelligence.
So the situation you describe seems unlikely to happen, and if it does happen, it almost certainly won't last for long. In fact, I think humans with significantly enhanced intelligence are far more likely to end up being a threat to everyone else than any A.I. supercomputer. Sure, the A.I. might have an IQ of 3000 while the enhanced human "only" has an IQ of 300, but the A.I. has no reason to actually *do* anything on its own initiative, while the enhanced human has all the same messy and sometimes dangerous drives as a regular human, just with a far greater capacity to actually pursue their possibly-hostile goals. The A.I. is also stuck in a box, whereas the enhanced human has a body that's at least as good as a normal human's and probably better (either because they were designed with enhanced physiology to go along with their enhanced intelligence, or because they figured out how to enhance their own bodies), allowing them far greater freedom and agency.
I mostly agree with your first point. Keeping control of a human who is smarter than the human attempting to keep control is generally unstable. The literary hypothetical example in Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" posits "focused" people who are a bit more like special purpose AI - modified to be obsessive on a particular specialty. If this were feasible, the modified person would be less of a threat to their ruler than a more generally intelligent person would be.
Re an AI with an IQ of 3000 being less of a threat than a person with an IQ of 300: I disagree. If an organization builds or purchases an AI, presumably the organization intends to _do_ something with that AI, to set it some goal. At that point, all the usual questions about what instrumental subgoals will be generated and what the AI will do to pursue them come into play. And the usual "alignment" issues come up: If one of the AI's subsubgoals is something no one anticipated, and it has side effects no human wants, but the AI is smart enough to achieve this subsubgoal - oops, too bad. ( Personally, I think that this is eventually what is going to happen. )
Re not having a body: Drones exist. Things like the Boston Dynamics "dog" bodies exist. Remote-controlled machinery exists. It won't be _trivially_ easy for a more-or-less runaway AI to get lots of control over physical objects, but it is basically a computer security question. If the security of the computer directly controlling the physical machinery is breakable, and the AI is smart enough, and one of its subsubgoals calls for control of that machinery, then it will eventually get control.
"More likely, the geniuses would end up exploiting those elites instead, pretending to be brilliant-yet-humble servants while actually turning the resources of their elite masters toward their own ends."
See: court eunuchs everywhere, from Byzantium (where the emperors had to take steps to limit their power and authority) to China.
Or indeed, any powerful officials who manage to replace the ostensible monarch or emperor as de facto supreme authority, reducing the emperor to a figurehead in whose name they rule. The shogunate in Japan and the Peshwa of the Maratha Empire in India (nominally they were prime ministers under the king but in effect they were the actual rulers), for examples of this.
Discarding all ethics, I suppose the correct technique for one who wanted to exploit a super-intelligent human would be to try to create, not an improvement of general ability, but the correct combination of superability and disability to create an idiot-savant skilled in a particular area of interest but utterly incapable of functioning on their own- a Rain Man, not a Merlin.
I think the argument would be more along the lines of parents consenting to body modifications for their children in the hopes of raising their social standing.
"There has been a recent increasing interest in both the short and long term effects of sex steroid hormones on bone health in transgender persons. Based on the available data, hormone therapy appears to maintain or improve bone density in transgender adults in short term follow-up. For transgender children and adolescents, there is concern that GnRH agonist use prior to the initiation of sex steroid hormones may put patients at risk for worsening bone density."
Morally, there's a big difference between a consenting 16 year old taking cross-sex hormones and selling an unwilling 8-12 year old to the church to be castrated.
Practically, the hormone profile that trans people are aiming for when they go on HRT is either testosterone or estrogen dominant, unlike that of the eununch who doesn't have much of either. This avoids complications such as osteoporosis.
What makes you think the 8-12 year olds were unwilling? I would guess quite the contrary, that they were told glamorous stories of the life of a castrato -- rubbing elbows with the emperor and pope, forsooth! -- and of course they would be generally unable to comprehend what the loss of adult sexuality meant -- there is hardly an 8 year old, and often 12 year olds, who doesn't think the oppposite sex "yucky."
...and if you protest that the 8-12 year old can hardly be said to give *informed* consent because they're just freaking kids...well, that would be the issue with the consent of the modern 16-year-old, too.
Also, it's not even like 8-12 year olds aren't being given hormones nowadays. The whole point of puberty blockers is to take them before puberty, after all.
I certainly didn't expect that analogy, and it worked out better than the obvious angle. A lot depends on details we largely don't know (what exactly _is_ the long-time effect of puberty blockers, for instance?).
One random quibble: the X-Men comparison at the beginning really didn't work for me. It activated my nerdy quibbling reflexes without really adding anything.
The relationship between official church condemnation of castration and many of the people involved seeing it as an almost sacred act is fascinating. Reminds me very much of modern Americans saying they have religious objections to vaccination even as the official leaders of their denominations endorse vaccination drives.
I thought it was fine (it’s not the author’s comparison, either). The X-Men comparison helped set the stage for the Castrati’s social role; a class of people that are used and admired for their abilities but also reviled for their differences. Maybe it went on too long would be the only problem I had.
My problem is that it felt kind of random, like a high school essay writer trying to hard. There isn't any *special* connection between castratii and xmen, and the comparison doesn't provide any new information, and there are obvious differences that undermine the random dot-connecting, some even acknowledged in the text. I think the key problem with something like this is that you could pick a large number of things other than xmen and make an equally strong and illuminating argument, which is to say that there is no argument.
This is more like one of those "take two things that are vaguely similar, list all the similarities, ignore the differences, and then pretend that this counts as insight and BS your way to an A" essays. The fact that the reference it is badly trying to shoehorn in is pop culture doesn't exactly do it in favors either, since it makes it seem like either an essay writer with small reference pools, or something trying to be "with it" to connect to the audience without understanding what they are talking about.
I refer to M-to-F autogynephilic transsexuals "ex-men," partly for the science fiction allusion, but also because readers tend to find the term less confusing than more orthodox jargon like "transwomen." "Ex-men" is like how golf announcers on TV used to refer to "right-breaking putts" for ones aimed left of the hole, but eventually settled on "left to right-breaking putts" as less confusing to listeners.
"Transwoman" leaves a lot of people thinking "oh, she is a woman who has announced she is trans," whereas "ex-man," like "left-to-right breaking putt," is self-evident.
It's not quite that simple-- I find that transwoman and transman take some extra processing power compared to mtf and ftm. I'm willing to accommodate what people what to be called, but that doesn't mean the difficulty doesn't exist.
Speak for yourself. I often find that I have to come up short and work out whether a "transwoman" is a man who's transitioned into a woman or a woman who's announced that she's trans.
Who said I assumed it? I learned it, by studying biology, the natural world, et cetera. It's an observation, not a theory. If I study a cat or an elephant, it is either male or female, full stop. I do not need to ask the cat or elephant its feelings or inquire into its history to make the determination. Every cell in its body is stamped with the mark.
Now if someone wants to invent a separate category of characterization that has some resemblance to biological sex -- say, encompasses typical social behavior, psychology, et cetera, which are often predictable consequences of sex -- and if the inventors want to say a person's placement in *this* category depends on his or her self-image or history I have no objection. Have at it. If I find the new distinction useful, I'll be happy to use it myself.
But hijacking an existing concept and word for the purpose is just being an annoying and discourteous Newspeak dictioneer, someone who degrades rather than improves communication by obfuscating the language to suit ideological aims.
As a retired programmer, I've run into _lots_ of situations where I (or other programmers on the team) had originally though we could describe something as a single bit, but exceptions turned up and we needed a richer data structure with more alternatives for accuracy.
A person with XY chromosomes and high estrogen levels has both similarities to and differences from both a central example of a cis_woman and a central example of a cis_man. "Transwoman" seems like a reasonable term for capturing part of that information.
"Now that my conscious is clear, let’s turn to the other end of the spectrum: those rock star castrati like Farinelli who brushed shoulders with the upper crust of society."
Yeah, castrati and eunuchs are different things entirely. The reviewer should know that and make the distinction clear. Castration is grotesque but relatively survivable. The mutilation required to produce a eunuch when practiced without modern medical procedures had a high mortality rate.
I was also thinking in terms of the immense power of an emperor that he could demand such sacrifice. But presumably that part of the allure for billionaires to buy sports teams.
What interests me is the rise of the counter-tenor, and there are some really excellent singers. Since there were no more castrati to sing those roles, many of them became 'breeches roles' where mezzo-sopranos and altos took them on. Now the pendelum is swinging back to cast men in those roles once more, but counter-tenors.
Here is Philippe Jarousky as a suitably creepy Nero from "L'incoronazione di Poppea"
I kept thinking of counter-tenor while reading the review, too. There's pop music with counter-tenor vocals, too (to no one's surprise, I imagine): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S11k94ioTh8
Once again, time for a relevant fiction recommendation! Vernon Lee's story from her 1895 collection "Hauntings", titled 'A Wicked Voice' about a composer haunted and indeed obsessed with an 18th castrato who was exactly this liminal figure, half-angel and half-devil, who could literally kill with his voice:
"Singer, thing of evil, stupid and wicked slave of the voice, of that instrument which was not invented by the human intellect, but begotten of the body, and which, instead of moving the soul, merely stirs up the dregs of our nature! For what is the voice but the Beast calling, awakening that other Beast sleeping in the depths of mankind, the Beast which all great art has ever sought to chain up, as the archangel chains up, in old pictures, the demon with his woman’s face? How could the creature attached to this voice, its owner and its victim, the singer, the great, the real singer who once ruled over every heart, be otherwise than wicked and contemptible? But let me try and get on with my story.
...I can see all my fellow-boarders, leaning on the table, contemplating the print, this effeminate beau, his hair curled into ailes de pigeon, his sword passed through his embroidered pocket, seated under a triumphal arch somewhere among the clouds, surrounded by puffy Cupids and crowned with laurels by a bouncing goddess of fame. I hear again all the insipid exclamations, the insipid questions about this singer:—”When did he live? Was he very famous? Are you sure, Magnus, that this is really a portrait,” &c. &c. And I hear my own voice, as if in the far distance, giving them all sorts of information, biographical and critical, out of a battered little volume called The Theatre of Musical Glory; or, Opinions upon the most Famous Chapel-masters and Virtuosi of this Century, by Father Prosdocimo Sabatelli, Barnalite, Professor of Eloquence at the College of Modena, and Member of the Arcadian Academy, under the pastoral name of Evander Lilybaean, Venice, 1785, with the approbation of the Superiors. I tell them all how this singer, this Balthasar Cesari, was nick-named Zaffirino because of a sapphire engraved with cabalistic signs presented to him one evening by a masked stranger, in whom wise folk recognized that great cultivator of the human voice, the devil; how much more wonderful had been this Zaffirino’s vocal gifts than those of any singer of ancient or modern times; how his brief life had been but a series of triumphs, petted by the greatest kings, sung by the most famous poets, and finally, adds Father Prosdocimo, “courted (if the grave Muse of history may incline her ear to the gossip of gallantry) by the most charming nymphs, even of the very highest quality.”
...I realized my delusion when, on rounding the point of the Giudecca, the murmur of a voice arose from the midst of the waters, a thread of sound slender as a moonbeam, scarce audible, but exquisite, which expanded slowly, insensibly, taking volume and body, taking flesh almost and fire, an ineffable quality, full, passionate, but veiled, as it were, in a subtle, downy wrapper. The note grew stronger and stronger, and warmer and more passionate, until it burst through that strange and charming veil, and emerged beaming, to break itself in the luminous facets of a wonderful shake, long, superb, triumphant.
...How well I knew that voice! It was singing, as I have said, below its breath, yet none the less it sufficed to fill all that reach of the canal with its strange quality of tone, exquisite, far-fetched.
They were long-drawn-out notes, of intense but peculiar sweetness, a man’s voice which had much of a woman’s, but more even of a chorister’s, but a chorister’s voice without its limpidity and innocence; its youthfulness was veiled, muffled, as it were, in a sort of downy vagueness, as if a passion of tears withheld.
...He struck a few chords and sang. Yes, sure enough, it was the voice, the voice that had so long been persecuting me! I recognized at once that delicate, voluptuous quality, strange, exquisite, sweet beyond words, but lacking all youth and clearness. That passion veiled in tears which had troubled my brain that night on the lagoon, and again on the Grand Canal singing the Biondina, and yet again, only two days since, in the deserted cathedral of Padua. But I recognized now what seemed to have been hidden from me till then, that this voice was what I cared most for in all the wide world.
The voice wound and unwound itself in long, languishing phrases, in rich, voluptuous rifiorituras, all fretted with tiny scales and exquisite, crisp shakes; it stopped ever and anon, swaying as if panting in languid delight. And I felt my body melt even as wax in the sunshine, and it seemed to me that I too was turning fluid and vaporous, in order to mingle with these sounds as the moonbeams mingle with the dew."
To my taste, this seems like a spectacular overreaction to a voice - but I'm a retired programmer, not a composer, and it is common to many professions to (from an outsider's view) overemphasize the concerns and tools of their profession. ( I'm also taking Vernon Lee's depiction of her composer character at her word - and it is perfectly within a writer's right to overdramatize their characters, as they see fit. Poe and Lovecraft certainly did. )
Ah, you have to remember that Lee is writing a ghost/horror story. The composer is one of the new style who follow Wagner and he is all for instrumental music over the primacy of the voice, and despises the old-fashioned 18th century exaltation of extraordinary singers for their vocal talents and not for following the music. So the castrati, and this Zaffirino, are the examples of all that he hates and repudiates in his music.
That he then ends up haunted/obsessed with that voice, and its seductive, magical and unnatural power and beauty, due to what is a dream or vision or seeing a haunting of the time (there's enough ambiguity to what happens) is the revenge of the singer, who is depicted as being in his time very proud and vengeful and who did take revenge on those who insulted him. The composer has mocked and insulted him, so the revenge is that from then on, after his fever dream/ghost vision, the composer is unable to write anything in his cherished new style but only in the 18th century style of excessive (as he thinks) deference to the voice.
And it's important that Zaffirino is a castrato, is neither man nor woman but somewhere in between, as that aids with the whole idea of a surviving vengeful ghost who had power to kill with his voice in his lifetime, and to possess a living man after his death. The implied (and overt) sensuality is important element too; the composer prefers writing instrumental music since instruments do not produce their sounds out of flesh and blood and are therefore 'purer' and more 'spiritual' - it's the whole Wagnerian-school ideal of Art above all; " Wagner (1813–1883) decried the Italian singing model, alleging that it was concerned merely with "whether that G or A will come out roundly". He advocated a new, Germanic school of singing that would draw "the spiritually energetic and profoundly passionate into the orbit of its matchless Expression."
The revenge of the castrato voice is to pull the composer back into the world of flesh and blood, of love and revenge, of sensual effects on the body and being reduced to emotion and longing and desire, not carried off into the heavens by some ethereal, spiritual experience. It's seductive and dangerous, diabolic in one sense.
That's what I think Lee is going for there, anyway 😁
Hmm - so the instrumental / vocal conflict could be viewed partially as a factional / ideological dispute? Viewed from today's perspective, there is a certain irony now that both forms of music are stored as digital data, and mostly presented to the listener through digital-to-analog converters and electromagnets driving speakers. It would be amusing to hear both Zaffirino's and Lee's composer's reactions to this development.
In the absence of recording technology, I have a mild preference for instrumental music, as the absence of a hard link to the detailed anatomy of a singer makes it slightly less perishable. But, since recording technology does exist in our time, this doesn't really matter. I find the concern about whether the sounds arise out of flesh and blood or not somewhat amusing ... After all, the _appreciation_ of the sounds, for either vocal or instrumental music, depends on human central nervous system responses.
One comment about Zaffirino's liminal state as a castrato: If one looks at a large enough numbers of parameters/features for a given person, one will usually find _some_ aspect of them which sits in between neat categories. If there are a hundred significant aspects (sexual, other physiological, professional, religious, dietary, ideological,...) to someone, and a 10% probability that any aspect falls in a grey area, then more than 99.99% of people are in _some_ grey area.
Hmm, I wonder if there's been any effort to recruit people with androgen insensitivity (or other endocrine disorders affecting testosterone) to be singers. We could hear what a castrato sounds like without the castration.
edit: upon further thought androgen insensitivity wouldn't produce the castrato phenotype since the estrogen would still affect bones, etc. Plus, as Peter Shenkin points out these people usually present as female.
A better model might be hypogonadism, such as Kallmann syndrome (hypogonadotropic) or LH insensitivity (hypergonadotropic).
There are a few sopranists (men who sing in soprano range, higher than countertenor) who are believed to be natural castrati, due to naturally-occuring endocrine abnormalities.
Radu Marian is one of them.
I was a bit surprised to read that "under the influence of testicular secretion, the vocal cords increase in length by 67% in males and 24% in females (Jenkins, 2000)." I'm guessing "testicular" should read "testosterone", since women do secrete some testosterone, but typically not in testicles.
Thank you for the link! I was unaware of this singer, and he does have a completely different quality of voice to even a counter-tenor. A voice like a boy treble, but clearly mature. If the castrati sang anything like this, no wonder their voices were considered unearthly and unattainable except by supreme sacrifice.
Also lurking somewhere on YouTube is this spectacularly mislabeled recording, purported to be of Radu Marian at age 7, but really of Goar Gasparyan, an Armenian soprano, singing the Queen of the Night's vengeance aria:
Which I think is interesting! On sustained notes, Radu sounds so young and... buoyant... that I would not expect breathy coloratura passages! That is, it's normal for young singers to sound breathy on those passages, but I had supposed that was due more to inexperience than physiology.
Perhaps it is inexperience at that. Plenty of professional sopranos are *not* known for clear, rapid-fire melismas, but blur, warble, or cluck them, and they still have careers. Some have been divas. That said, there seem to be more professionals than ever who do nail their melismas. One I know of started her career as a clucker, and is now a nailer. She has a nice career, and is well-regarded, but is hardly famous, just standard for her specialty these days.
I think the 'warbling' - and this is totally ignorant, uneducated guessing on my part - may be down to the training; that the expressive, emotional, acting/interpretation tradition started and so the emphasis was on the 'sob in the voice' and developing vibrato - this Wikipedia article on 'bel canto' seems to put the style change for the newer 19th century 'realist' composers and librettists:
"The popularity of the bel canto style as espoused by Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini faded in Italy during the mid-19th century. It was overtaken by a heavier, more ardent, less embroidered approach to singing that was necessary to perform the innovative works of Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) with maximum dramatic impact. Tenors, for instance, began to inflate their tone and deliver the high C (and even the high D) directly from the chest rather than resorting to a suave head voice/falsetto as they had done previously – sacrificing vocal agility in the process. Sopranos and baritones reacted in a similar fashion to their tenor colleagues when confronted with Verdi's drama-filled compositions. They subjected the mechanics of their voice production to greater pressures and cultivated the exciting upper part of their respective ranges at the expense of their mellow but less penetrant lower notes. Initially at least, the singing techniques of 19th-century contraltos and basses were less affected by the musical innovations of Verdi, which were built upon by his successors Amilcare Ponchielli (1834–1886), Arrigo Boito (1842–1918) and Alfredo Catalani (1854–1893).
One reason for the eclipse of the old Italian singing model was the growing influence within the music world of bel canto's detractors, who considered it to be outmoded and condemned it as vocalization devoid of content. To others, however, bel canto became the vanished art of elegant, refined, sweet-toned musical utterance. Rossini lamented in a conversation that took place in Paris in 1858 that: "Alas for us, we have lost our bel canto". Similarly, the so-called German style was as derided as much as it was heralded. In the introduction to a collection of songs by Italian masters published in 1887 in Berlin under the title Il bel canto, Franz Sieber wrote: "In our time, when the most offensive shrieking under the extenuating device of 'dramatic singing' has spread everywhere, when the ignorant masses appear much more interested in how loud rather than how beautiful the singing is, a collection of songs will perhaps be welcome which – as the title purports – may assist in restoring bel canto to its rightful place."
In the late-19th century and early-20th century, the term "bel canto" was resurrected by singing teachers in Italy, among whom the retired Verdi baritone Antonio Cotogni (1831–1918) was a pre-eminent figure. Cotogni and his followers invoked it against an unprecedentedly vehement and vibrato-laden style of vocalism that singers increasingly used after around 1890 to meet the impassioned demands of verismo writing by composers such as Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924), Ruggero Leoncavallo (1857–1919), Pietro Mascagni (1863–1945), Francesco Cilea (1866–1950) and Umberto Giordano (1867–1948), as well as the auditory challenges posed by the non-Italianate stage works of Richard Strauss (1864–1949) and other late-romantic/early-modern era composers, with their strenuous and angular vocal lines and frequently dense orchestral textures."
What made me think about this was an interview years (decades) back with Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys, where he discussed his voice and when he was learning to sing, and how he was told he had a voice better suited for Baroque than other styles.
I took a STEM rather than music major at college because STEM was the "sensible choice" and I'm chronically sickly, which, for all the romantic tales of tubercular musicians and whatnot, makes performing music *much* more impractical (prolly why it's so romantic). But I was reasonably involved in the music department.
As I understand it, "healthy vibrato" is, above all, practical. It's less fatiguing and aids cutting through to be heard over accompaniment. Vibrato is also an expressive choice, but music isn't lacking for other expressive choices, and needlessly paining yourself or the listener with chronic vibrato because you think it's "expressive" is frowned on.
Despite lore, there seems no evidence that each person has one true, "natural" voice that needs to be "liberated" in order to sing best, but whether by birth or cumulative accidents of training (I'd bet both), singers typically develop a voice "size" and tone quality that they're comfortable with, and it usually pains the audience more if singers stray too much from their comfort zone. Singing more beautifully often *feels* like finding and "liberating" some "natural voice", even if that's not what's literally happening.
Along with this "natural voice" comes "natural vibrato". Some voices "naturally" have more of it than others, and, if accompaniment risks drowning you out, you can make your voice "bigger" by piling on the vibrato.
That, basically, is why "Wagner's music is better than it sounds." Most opera stars don't have voices big enough to cut through Wagnerian accompaniment without piling on the vibrato. A "true Wagnerian voice" will be big enough that it doesn't have to pile on quite so much, and the result sounds better — only, there are fewer of those voices than there are roles in Wagner operas, with predictable results. I've attended a few Wagner operas, and by far the one with the "best cast" was the one where the conductor paid the most attention to ensuring the orchestra didn't egg the singers into oversinging.
Producing clear ornamentation requires matching "natural vibrato" to the ornament somehow.
"Tapping" a note staccato (often shown off in coloratura arias) "naturally" puts less vibrato on the note, but it takes intense practice to run those "taps" together into melismas — and singers can expect to cluck unconvincingly until they've mastered it (if they ever do).
There's also legato approach to ornamentation. For example, it's usually easier to sing a passable trill by smoothly "widening the vibrato" than by thinking of bouncing rapidly between two notes. Melismas usually break naturally into smaller groups of notes. A clear attack on the first note in a group, followed by a vibrato wiggle that kindasorta approximates the rest of the notes in the group, sounds better to most people than clucking does, even if it's a bit "blurry", and consequently, it's what many professional singers do. If you do a convincing job of it, that's "bel canto", too.
Some singers master both Sturm und Drang on slower passages and clear, swift ornamentation, but between differences in "natural voice" and the fact that any time spent mastering one thing is time not spent on others, professionals typically do one better than the other. "Dramatic coloratura" roles call for both, but it's common for those roles to be filled by singers who aren't equally good at both. Diana Damrau is admired for having a voice that's unusually balanced between skill sets. For a coloratura, her voice is unusually "heavy", "womanly", and (if needed) "aggressive".
Since they did not have male sexual organs but vaginas (to external appearance), many were raised as women and identified as women.I heard of one case ca. 1980 of such a woman who, when she failed to menstruate, was given estrogen as a teen-ager, which caused her to develop breasts. She was happily married and enjoyed sex. But she got worried and saw a doctor to ask if she had some terrible illness, since she had never menstruated. He had genetic testing done and indeed she had androgen insensitivity. At the time I read the story, ca. 1980, the doctor did not tell her the origin of her condition. Rather, he assured her that she was suffering from no serious illness that would shorten her life.
I don't know if she sang and in what range or what she looked like; but it does raise the question why women in general, though they have higher voices, do not exhibit the physical characteristics (facial, for example) that lack of testosterone causes in castrati. Of course, women do produce some testosterone and are sensitive to it, so maybe that suffices to negate the production of those physical characteristics.
Women don't have the physical characteristics of castrati because those are due to a lack of estrogen, which is the hormone involved in the closure of the epiphyseal cartilages. Some women with primary hypogonadism do have elongated features, though
Androgen insensitivity is a feature of the androgen receptors. Patients with complete androgen insensitivity do produce testosterone, sometimes in very high amounts, and that testosterone is peripherally converted to estrogen, resulting in a female penotype
There's a singer I like whose stage name is Ethel Cain who was assigned male at birth but whose body didn't produce enough testosterone to change her voice and who now takes estrogen HRT, she has an excellent voice and might not be too far off (though not the same thing, either)
What were the historical origins of the castrato? Did the practice develop out of some older practices in the Byzantine Empire or Medieval Europe? Why was this practice done almost exclusively in Italy and not anywhere else in Europe?
I know right? Who was the first nutter who came up with the notion of castrating boys so they could sing better? It apparently was first done in the Byzantine empire, but that has no relation with the Italian castratti. How do you even sell this idea at first?
Maybe it starts with a genuinely accidental castration, and an unfortunate boy who goes on to become a singer. Then he grows old, or dies altogether, and whoever was profiting off the first boy's talents start to think, ‘if only, by some supreme stroke of luck, there was *another* "swan biting off a boy's junk" incident…’ until the idea occurs to him to give luck a little nudge of his own. (Or the same thing happens with the jealous priest of the nearby village, consumed with envy at his life-long rival's choir prodigy…)
Arab slavers often castrated the male African slaves that they took, so it wouldn't be much of a problem to observe how that affected their development.
The effect of castration on adult male voices would have been well known for centuries, as castration for other reasons was not unknown in the ancient world. I vaguely recall the Persian Empire might have done it on a larger scale than the Greco-Roman world.
To my eye the appearance of the Chinese eunochs depicted does not exhibit the special physical features that appear in the castrati shown. I've never heard this mentioned of the court eunochs of the middle east, who are generally described as obese, or at least overweight. I have also heard (don't ask me where, and maybe it's untrue) that these eunochs could and did get erections (as indeed pre-pubescent boys can) and even did indulge in sexual intercourse, though of course they could not procreate. However, the Wikipedia article on Eunuch does say that they were sometimes used as sexual partners.
Why not just use woman guards then? Men tend to be stronger, sure, but it's already less important when fighting with weapons, and much of it is probably testosterone.
... I guess men are just cheaper in polygynous societies.
I wonder if Cartier-Bresson had a good translator or was there some confusion about who the person in the photo was? I could imagine them being part of the (former) Imperial court, but they might have been termed a 'eunuch' for lack of a better term for their condition.
Check out Octavia Butler's EarthSeed or Patternist series for exploration in these areas.
Future ecological collapse will propel the rise of militant eco-cults that use elaborate schemes of genetic modification, plastic surgery, and hormone therapy (and whatever else is needed) to create animal-human hybrids (think Thundercats or Stalking Cat) as a part of some master plan to bring about radical environmental restoration (steal this premise).
There is the 1994 movie about Farinelli (titled "Farinelli") which is great fun, plays a little fast and loose with history, but is wonderfully dramatic to get across the superstar status of this man at that time:
I've often wondered: male tenors and countertenors are both rare and highly valued as singers. Are we going to start seeing musical families not castrating but doing slight hormone treatments to make sure their voice doesn't fully drop? You wouldn't need enough to sterilize them: most tenors can have children. But I believe (not a biologist) the deepness of your voice has something to do with the mix of hormones in your teenage years. At least for men.
Hmm... I wonder if one could get away with sticking something (medicated stent???) in the blood supply of the larynx? A _lot_ of limitations in medicine come from the circulatory system being well-mixed, when one often wants the effects of some molecule on organ A but not on organ B. Anyone know to what extent one can get around that?
Men who have the range of a tenor or even a countertenor are much more plentiful than men with those voice types who have highly trained voices, plus whatever physical "it factors" contribute to making their voice carry and be pleasant to listen to.
IIRC, some years back, some ENT MDs studied the physiology of classically-trained singers and came to the conclusion that theories as to what makes the vocal physiology of outstanding classical singers different from average physiology were mostly bunk.
Absence of obvious impediments like chronic sinusitis, laryngitis, respiratory problems, or "stage fright" obviously helps. Vocal nodes seem bad, but even there, plenty of singers sing with them, many say they find their voices improve when nodes are excised, but improvement upon excision doesn't seem a sure thing. (Excision forces vocal rest and rehab. I wonder what the results would be for placebo surgery paired with the same rest and rehab?)
Slightly emasculating a male teen's voice would not guarantee that teen's motivation to go through vocal training, nor would it ensure "naturally" pleasant, carrying tone production. High male voice types might be relatively rare in the general population, but they're plentiful compared to the number of men who make a career out of those voice types.
Some pop culture recommendations that might pair well with this essay: Songmaster, a science-fiction book about a boy sculpted and raised to be the greatest singer in the galaxy and his intersection with the space politics of his time. He's not a Castrato, but he is given drugs which inhibit his ability to fully undergo puberty and eventually cause huge complications. Furthermore, like the X-man analogy, its implied that his singing is SO good he's essentially some sort of low-level psychic broadcaster, able to override people's will and emotions with his singing. This is a book by Orson Scott Card, so it contains a lot of the weird child-abuse and homosexual panicky undertones that a lot of his work has, but many people consider it to be his best, and I would agree with that.
Also, "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," a film based on a stage show about a person who has undergone a botched gender-reassignment surgery and is grappling with the philosophical implications of that, while also trying to make it as a pop star in the United States. A lot of the music from the show explores the "liminal space" idea you talk about.
Hedwig has this great running metaphor of the scar of an incomplete separation - it arises in her botched surgery, in various references to Berlin and the wall, in "The Origin of Love" with the Aristophanes story about sexual orientation from Plato's Symposium, and probably in other places I'm not remembering at the moment.
Not to mention Paolo Bacigalupi‘s _The Fluted Girl_ (in _Pump 6 and other stories_) and every bit as horrific as all his fiction, but directly relevant to the concerns of the review.
The K-pop industry is notorious for every part of this except the bio modifications. (Actually, if we add in plastic surgeries, it might be doing every part of this).
Very cool review. I think the transhumanism angle at the end is an interesting little thought experiment or prediction, even if I disagree with the author's own speculations that follow. So far, though, we seem not to be headed in that direction at all. People who engage in extreme bodily modifications these days don't seem to have much of a higher purpose in mind. Those people who get their tongues split, for example, don't seem to have anything more complex in mind than "ooooooh, that looks cool because it's like a snake!" from what I can tell. I guess my point here is that our proto-transhumanists need to think bigger and better.
In all seriousness, the above mentioned last surviving Chinese eunuch Sun Yaoting was castrated at age 8 months before the last Qing emperor was deposed. So basically that.
The last eunuchs actually had a (comparatively) comfortable job of being brought around by the Red Guard as a kind of human demonstration of the evil degeneracy of the Qing and the monarchy's corruption of the people. They got to live decently (for the context) and most of them died of old age.
Funnily enough, the same is true for Puyi, the last Qing emperor. After an (admittedly typical of Maoist China, e.g. full of varying levels of ritual humiliation) nine-year period of imprisonment by the Maoist government for his role in the Japanese occupation, he seemed to have a genuine change of heart towards Communist sympathies and lived a humble life as a street sweeper and sometime tour guide in the Imperial City while occasionally acting in propaganda films (including a few where he played himself). He even wrote his own state-sanctioned autobiography about his journey from the last Emperor of China to an avowed Maoist, which was originally supposed to have been ghostwritten. His original text (with censorship regarding his prison treatment) was kept because his prose was apparently so passionate and earnest that the propogandist chosen as his ghostwriter deemed his own draft the inferior work.
It's called "From Emperor to Citizen" in English (although it might also be listed under the literal translation of its title, the very simple "The First Half of My Life"), and it looks like it goes for around $15 on Amazon.
I love these reviews! But I have an administrative suggestion: please put the book's full title and the name of the book's author, in the title of the review post.
I know that the titling of posts is a great kind of subtle art at ACX (and throughout Scott's writing in general) -- it's part of the "techne" (*) -- but the book title would make these reviews easier to index/find, and I feel like the author's name should get prominent billing.
Maybe substack has a "sub-heading" tag or attribute where this info shpuld go. I feel it should be more prominent. In fact, I am (pretty) sure that, in print media, it is required at the head of a review.
Besides that bit of administrivia, all the reviews in this year's pool have been epic, so fun, so much great work.
BRetty
* - I think of how suck.com started the use of embedded hyperlinks to make a kind of second voice running alongside the day's column. A voice that could be mocking or alarmist or an ESL translator devolving into Kabuki dumbshow or the feuding married couple doing the LAX announcements in the movie "Airplane" or sometimes just exactly what it really was;- snark.
What a brutal and horrific society we used to live in. Thank god that the monstrous people who used to participate in this process are all dead - hopefully soon to be followed by the people who participate in the modern-day equivalents.
I was going to post the same thing! If I was writing a review of a book called "The Castrato" about castrati, I would get my singulars and plurals right. This is culpable negligence.
to address the obvious confusion -- looks like the adrenal glands also produce a small amount of testosterone; you're not getting very far in terms of sex drive on none at all.
One thing that has not been mentioned in the review, but is nevertheless interesting, is that eunuchs and castrati seem to have lived much longer lives than average.
In Korea, for instance: "The average lifespan of eunuchs was 70.0 ± 1.76 years, which was 14.4–19.1 years longer than the lifespan of non-castrated men of similar socio-economic status. [...] Notably, the average lifespan of kings and male royal family members, who spent their whole lives inside the palace, was 47.0 ± 3.21 and 45.0 ± 2.79 years, respectively."
The Castrati mentioned in the article didn't die young, either. Caffarelli and Senesino both lived to 72 or 73. Farinelli died at 77. Even the apparently grotesquely large Bernacchi lived to 71. Yet in the 18th century, per "Lifespans of the European Elite, 800–1800," the average adult European nobleman was most likely to die between the ages of 55 and 60.
It seems to me that there's a plausible biochemical reason for all of this. Testosterone activates the mTOR cellular signaling pathway, whereas caloric restriction (and presumably senolytics like metformin) suppress mTOR activation.
Slightly less dramatic if you use the more apples-to-apples comparison: "we compared the lifespan of eunuchs with the lifespan of men from three non-eunuch families of similar social status, who lived during the same time periods (Supplemental information). The average lifespan of the non-eunuchs ranged from 50.9 to 55.6 years"
So royalty had somewhat shorter lifespans than their non-eunuch courtiers? More stress maybe?
Living to 70 is not impressive even for a non-castrated male. Now if they reached their 90s on average...
The thing is, everything under the sun activates or suppresses mTOR and it seems to be the 2020s HDL as the biological acronym of choice to write excited headlines about.
The Korean eunuchs were compared to men of similar socioeconomic status, who lived markedly shorter lives on average.
It's also easy enough to get life expectancy tables for 17th and 18th century European upper-classes and the nobility. Adult males tended to die at around age 55-60. And if that is too abstract, simply compare the famous castrati to the most famous and noteworthy classical composers of that era: Beethoven died at 57, Schubert at age 31, Mozart at 35, J.S. Bach at 65, Chopin at 39, Vivaldi at 63, Paganini at 57, Pachelbel at 52. That the castrati mentioned in the article all seem to have lived beyond 70 is, in fact, remarkable.
And this all corresponds to the situation in 18th and early 19th century America, as well. Though the overall picture is somewhat murky, American universities have kept extremely good demographic data, and between 1785 and 1814 graduates of Yale College had a life expectancy at age 20 of 40.4 years. (That is, 40.4 years of remaining life, for an expected lifespan of 60.4 years.) Princeton fared slightly worse over that same period, at 36.2 years from age 20. There's some discussion of 19th century American mortality at PMC2885717.
While reading this, I wondered whether Andrzej Sapkowski (writer of "The Witcher") series drew any inspiration from the castrati when coming up with the eponymous Witchers. Both professions involve being subjected as a boy to a procedure with a significant mortality rate, in order to become superhumanly good at a specific task (singing, or hunting monsters). Both are prized for their skills while simultaneous being isolated for their differences. And both are rendered infertile by the procedure, yet assigned a significant level of sex appeal.
Admittedly, it could just be a coincidence, but you can certainly see the similarities.
Black Widow (and by extension, the entire organization of Black Widows) in the Marvel movies are a gender-swapped example, they're made completely infertile through surgery because their Soviet/Russian Federation handlers don't want them getting pregnant.
A more conventional example would be the Unsullied in Game of Thrones, male eunuchs who are explicitly cut "root and stem" to prevent them from reproducing or having sex drives. Although the latter part is sometimes unsuccessful, since some of them are shown to still have sexual desires.
I think witchers being infertile is there just so Geralt can fuck a lot.
On the other hand Sapkowski is a huge history nerd so I wouldn't put the inspiration past him, though I have no idea how much he cares for Italian history in particular. His "Narrenturm" referred to basically nothing west of modern Germany and south of modern Czech Republic.
Sumo wrestling might offer a closer comparison than American football.
Teenage wrestlers leave home to live in a compound under the supervision of a retired wrestler. The wrestlers train for hours each day, do even more unusual things to their bodies than aspiring NFL players do, and obey a bunch of supposedly ancient prohibitions and duties. For example, no romantic relationships until they achieve a certain rank. (https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20150508-the-life-of-a-sumo-wrestler)
Based on something I dimly remember reading, I think that the socioeconomic background of wrestlers tends to be below-average. I couldn't find verification.
>Based on something I dimly remember reading, I think that the socioeconomic background of wrestlers tends to be below-average. I couldn't find verification.
It's not at all a coincidence that out of the last 6 Yokozuna (highest) ranked wrestlers, 5 have been Mongolian.
That’s the sort of thing that can be interpreted in different ways. Sure, one interpretation is fewer choices; but a different interpretation is that decadent societies no longer inspire individuals to try for anything impressive but difficult, while pre-decadent societies have not reached that point.
Would modern Western society produce a Scott or an Amundsen? Unclear to me. And that’s very definitely not about “lower economic status”.
I think those reasons are probably two sides of the same coin. Japanese participation in sumo started falling in the 70s and 80s, as families whose children were basically guaranteed a middle class life (and who didn't have many children to begin with) became less willing to send their sons to a demanding, often thankless life in a sumo stable. Foreign recruitment began around that time. There was actually an American Yokozuna in the 90s. That being said, to your point, the recent dominance of Mongolians is still massively disproportionate compared to their overall representation.
There is also at least one unrelated reason for this. There is a traditional wrestling style, called Bokh, which is similar to sumo and is a huge freaking deal in Mongolia. Many successful Mongolian sumo wrestlers come from noted Bokh families. Mongolians tend to be over-represented in a variety of wrestling styles for this reason.
"One of the funnier aspects of the book is how hilariously Italian the names of all the castrati were. A few examples: Loreto Vittori, Atto Melani, Antonio Bernacchi, Francesco Bernardi ("Senesino"), Valentino Urbani, Giusto Fernando Tenducci, Girolamo Crescentini, Giovanni Battista "Giambattista" Velluti, Venanzio Rauzzini."
I'm from Italy so this reads like an extremely normal list of names to me.
This is a real question: are Italian names really that funny to native English speakers? More than other foreign names?
I don't think I would find a set of random British or French or German or Russian names inherently hilarious.
I think any lists of names that are so clearly a certain nationality tend to be funny to English speakers. If I saw a long list of obviously German, obviously French, or obviously Russian names, I wouldn't probably find that funny, too. Relatedly, when I went to the cemetery my grandparents are buried in, I found it amusing how obnoxiously Polish most of the names were (my grandparents were also of Polish descent).
Obviously British is a little trickier, because I feel like making a name obviously British to an English speaker involves making it kind of a joke to begin with.
To my ear that's the reason. America is such a mongrel nation it's difficult to assemble a dozen Americans and *not* have an Giovanni mixed with a Johann, John, and J'hon (or some creative neologism). We get used to sets of names that have polyglot origin, so a list that is so clearly monoglot feels like it's the name of a trapeze act or something, a set of show names.
The names are just fine. My mom was a Castellano before she married. I shopped at Parlanti’s grocery store went to school with Sabettis, Palazzaris, Vitos, Timpanos and Bertuccis all in a small Minnesota town. If the author wants to take it up with my uncle Sonny Castellano and his hulking brothers… well he probably shouldn’t do that. ;)
I'm a native English speaker, and I found it a bit odd to have Italian names mentioned as funny, especially in a review on a musical topic, when so much music vocabulary is Italian. Then again, I know of a minor English-speaking celebrity who takes care to pronounce words in any foreign language but German as correctly as possible, but finds it funny to mispronounce German for some reason.
As others pointed out, it was also odd for the review to sometimes use "castrato" and "castrato's" instead of the correct plural. Some writers have others edit their work before submission, either friends who'll volunteer, or hired help. That's something of a luxury, obviously, but could have benefited this review.
I am an American with Italian ancestors and nothing about that list strikes me as funny or odd. Maybe the author is from Minnesota or Wisconsin. I would guess Italian names can strike some English speakers as funny because of the association with organized crime and/or New Jersey, both inherently kind of ridiculous.
The names didn't look odd to me, and I'm not Italian.
On the other hand, when I saw a woman's name which was a Hebrew first name and probably German/Ashkenazic last name, it took me a while to figure out why I thought she was overdoing it, then I realized I was used to the American custom of Ashkenazic Jews having more English first names.
I didn't think they were that funny, but there was a sort of tradition in British/American music of tenors who were not Italian taking on stereotypically Italian names for the sake of their career because the audience were so accustomed to "the best tenors are Italian".
So that may be behind that reaction; it sounds like someone trying to make singers sound the most 'Italian' they could sound.
Sounds plausible, and while explaining a joke can kill it, a hint if so would have been nice.
Unconvincing names for tenors, like Joeseppe Smithini or Gallo de Pulito (the "cleaning rooster" mascot of Chanteclair-brand cleaners), would be fairly funny.
Because I have a memory like a colander, the only example I can immediately think of is the American stage-magician who performed with a Chinese name (and in what would nowadays be called 'yellowface') inspired by a rivalry with a genuine Chinese magician:
Pretending to be Oriental (be that Arab, Indian, Chinese, etc.) for the purposes of stage acts arose out of the whole pop culture association of "the mysterious East" with magic and fakirs and so on.
To give a more charitable reading, there's also the issue that Europe's traditions simply don't go back as far as Asia's do (Greece is the oldest by far, and even there things are very attenuated by the LBAC; much of Europe wasn't civilised until Rome), and longer tradition = more mystique.
I read Gomorrah last week and send a short video of me reading a page to some friends because when read in succession it just becomes hilariously italian. 'Betalia diBrasa who was the cousin of Mario Bafruddo also worked for Tomballo diScione while serving under Tarsallo Bonpiera. When journalist Tasilla Luca di Porteza reported on the Murtalo family' it just becomes funny after a while.
Italian surnames make good brand names because English speakers feel like they can pronounce them and spell them (even if they can't). Also, there are a lot of different Italian surnames so they are not all the same, but not so many that they run out of all the good ones.
I think it is funny to the reviewer because as Americans we often stop to wonder "That's an interesting name, I wonder what it's origins are?" due to the wide range of options you run into here. When you then read a book or whatever and every new (and perhaps unusual) name you come by cuts you off and screams "ITALIAN!" over, and over, past the point where you think even someone trying to be stereotypical wouldn't have gone that far, it is kind of funny. You start to feel like the author is almost joking or being silly, as if it were a fiction writer saying to himself "I don't know the audience is going to get this character is Italian... I'd better really make it clear through his name." and of course over doing it.
Or when you read a name and think "Wow, that is the most German/Italian/Russian/whatever name I have ever heard" only for the next three character's names to top it, every time, that makes you giggle a little.
I imagine particularly after reading a long horrific section on castration it doesn't take much to break the tension.
I think Americans find one Italian name normal, but a full name weird. Italian-Americans have anglicized given names like Antonio → Anthony → Tony and Francesco → Francis → Frank. But that's true for any origin. The difference is that famous Italians are known in English by one name, such as Savonarola. Even contemporary figures like Fabio and Valentino.
If anyone is curious, my wife is a classically trained singer, and the musicology passages only make a little sense to her. However, I took some linguistics classes in college (and I'm a largely self-trained), and they make a lot more sense to me. In particular, she doesn't know what a formant is, but I learned about that from linguistics.
The part that's slightly weird to me about this is the widespread adoration of the castrato voice. I don't particularly like it. Even among modern singers, I prefer the baritone and bass over the tenor among men, and the contralto and mezzo over soprano among women.
You haven't heard a good castrato voice. No modern person has. At most, you've heard countertenors. Granted, you probably wouldn't like it that much since you generally prefer lower pitches. I don't remember whether the article gives the range for castrati.
Well, I did listen to the Youtube video of Farinelli, which was made in his 40s, with crappy old equipment et cetera -- but I can nevertheless readily hear the similarities to, and differences from, a woman's voice.
But it doesn't matter. I'm just not enough into singing of that style and pitch so that, if I was offered a time machine, I would pay ordinary airfare to go back and hear it, in person, in the Sistine Chapel. I'm not super moved by a lot of soprano or tenor music, either, with some exceptions, e.g. even a philistine such as myself could not fail to appreciate Damrau's der Hölle Rache, Callas's Habanera, or Pavarotti's Nessun Dorma. Although...now I think of it, there's also Björling and Merrill Pearl Fishers duet...perhaps I should be less dogmatic.
Still, generally I prefer a lower register in both men and women. The whole "ethereal" angelic impression doesn't work for me at all. I prefer my song to be more telluric. Exempli gratia I prefer the duet Placido Domingo and John Denver made of "Perhaps Love" considerably more than I do Domingo's solo performance of the same song.
Oh not at all. Four parts is something altogether different, I was refering to solos. In four part pieces I appreciate each of the voices (including the sopranos and tenors of course), they each contribute something essential.
Indeed, a great deal of the beauty of four part pieces (to me) is the cooperative nature of the music: men and women, voices from the most angelic to the most earthy, all working together, pulling the same musical plow. The sound of the soprano in that case working with the baritone and bass, for example, each a separate effort and yet yoked to the same objective, helping each other -- some kind of metaphor for marriage and civil society generally ha ha -- is marvelous. Harmony is fabulous! Like Lord Peter I appreciate it perhaps even more than a gifted solo performance.
And thanks for the link, again. You have excellent taste in pre-Classical music, if you put together a list of favorites somewhere I would definitely go listen to them all with gratitude.
Thank you for the kind words! I don't really have a list of recommendations, I do tend to go "I heard this, I liked it" at random all over the place rather than put together connected "if I liked X then I might like Y".
I will hear different versions of a piece, and be "I prefer A's version to B's version", but will I make a specific note of who A and B are? No, I will not, and then I will forget, and then I have to scrabble around on Youtube listening to different uploads to figure out "oh yeah it was *this* one" 😁
That being said, I tend to like the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra version of Pärt's works because they seem to 'get' him very reliably:
Mostly, I meander around on Youtube: "Oh, I like what I heard from Jordi Savall, any more by him?" "What's a theorbo? Oh, *that's* a theorbo" "Hey, 'Tous Les Matins du Monde' was a fantastic movie, who's this Marin Marais guy?" etc.
There seems to have been this sweet spot of 80s/90s/00s historical-musical movies, generally but not always French, that was just right for my tastes. I haven't gotten to see the full version of this one yet, but I just found it on Youtube so that goes on the list!
That being said, I find my tastes incline to early music, church music (chant, but polyphony too), 'world music' when it's nearer its folk roots, and up to around Mozart. The Romantic era is a bit too dramatic and colourful for me. Then some of the Moderns, I like Glass for instance (what I've heard of his, and I wasn't expecting to like it). I can't get on with the late Harrison Birtwistle, though I tried. Sugary pop-classical stuff like Rutter and Karl Jenkins puts me right off (I appreciate that Jenkins is very popular and very successful, and in the tradition of the mass of classical composers of the past who were very popular, very successful, and were writing the pop hits of their day - but are not now anything more than a footnote to the history of music). I don't think Jenkins is a 'classical music' composer, though that's probably nit-picking. Good luck to the guy, but it's the 'Il Divo'/other soft-classic pop hits style of music for the masses - and that's okay, but it's not 'highbrow art' (and, given that I also don't like much of 'highbrow art', I realise that is dreadful snobbery on my part).
Mostly I don't like auricular treacle, and that's what Jenkins et al. sound like to me.
EDIT: Oh yeah, horse-head fiddle rocks! Even when it's moved into folk-rock territory! 😁
It is generally to do with taste; I find that I prefer the tenor voice to the soprano (because a lot of soprano voices get a bit squeaky or forced when they try to belt out an extended note), but then I like counter-tenor and treble voices as well as bass.
I think it is more that I prefer the Baroque style - clear, music over text - than the modern (well, for 19th century as modern) Romantic style - emotional, Italian-influenced, 'weepy' in a sense because it is all about acting and interpretation.
She's a good singer. I do have certain reservations about English folk, since it sort of meandered off into being 60s type protest songs and less about the authentic traditions, but that's my own idiosyncracies talking.
I like the King's Singers in small doses. Rather like the SF men's choir, Chanticleer, they both have a tendency to the 'showbizzy' and musical theatre type performances, at least to my ear. Same with John Rutter's work - too poppy for my tastes.
For someone who can't sing a note, play an instrument, have no grounding in musicology, nor be able to reliably identify "doh" from "fah" when played on a piano and asked "what note was that?", I have terribly snobby tastes! 🤣
I write to disagree with the comparison to football players. People really do seek out violent, competitive sports because they *like it*. I think it’s somewhat ridiculous to compare voluntary games to getting castrated at age 10 or so.
"This was a particularly common theme in Chinese history where eunuchs served emperors, and sometimes became emperors themselves (Liu Jin and Wei Zhongxian)"
Nitpick: These two men were very powerful, but did not hold the title of Emperor. The only eunuch with that honor was Cao Teng, who received it long after his death. (When Cao Pi declared himself Emperor, he also granted the title to three dead ancestors, including his adopted great-grandfather Cao Teng.)
By the way, just thinking, I don't think I would enjoy the book, for two reasons.
(1) I find the fact that eunuchs have been created in many societies to be far more interesting than any of the special-case aspects of castrati.
(2) When the reviewer says"Musicologist Phil Ford traces the origin of the modern day mutant archetype back to the castrati", he doesn't say anything to to explain how the author does this. All that appears in the review is a pretty detailed discussion of the castrati, but the introductory remark about the tracing of the "modern archetype" to the castrati seems like a throwaway to me.
Offhand, it seems far-fetched to trace a variegated sci-fi fictional meme back to this interesting real-life phenomenon. For one thing, the few modern examples he mentions that I am familiar with (like The Incredible Hulk) were unique (if I can remember back that far). The castrati were a group who played a role in the society and moreover were created by the society to play this role, and the role was a subservient role, not a heroic or dominant role. As far as I know, there was just one Incredible Hulk and he happened by accident. So I'm skeptical of the connection.
Having said that, I'm only familiar with his pre-1970 "modern archetypes". I've not heard of most of them, like X-men.
Yes, the X-Men analogy was strained and never developed. The broader version of "exposed to gamma radiation and now hulks out when angry" is more along the lines; a gain of exceptional abilities that also has a great cost (Banner is isolated from normal society due to his fears of the Hulk and the pursuit of the Hulk by General Ross) but again, that was mentioned then dropped.
The castrati (and the general case of eunuchs) on their own merits is interest enough without having to drag in "what metaphor for modern relevance can I use to hook the attention of the historically and culturally illiterate?" efforts. We're not *that* much of cultural philistines that we won't read a review unless it namechecks comics or the Marvel universe!
The second Avengers movie explicitly drew parallels between Hulk and Black Widow on the basis that Black Widow had been rendered incapable of reproducing in the process of making her a super-spy and elite assassin. I don't think the parallels worked very well, but it shows that someone in the writers' room thought that "radiation-fueled rage monster" was comparable to a person who was effectively castrated (or whatever the female equivalent is) for the sake of being preternaturally skilled in their area of expertise.
Overall a nice and well written review, but I do wonder about the quote "perhaps the best (the only?) example of extended human-transhuman co-existence"
As far as I know, individuals with one foot in the Otherworld (or whatever you want to call it) were a staple of ancient societies. In the usual empires taught in school, the emperor was half human half god - but at least the Egyptians portrayed their gods as half-animals.
Then there is the role of shaman, medicine (wo)man, spirit healer and many other names that seems to exist across many different cultures, which as far as I know was definitely viewed as transhumane, and often as having one foot in the animal world (even if called the spirit world, it's generally populated by animal figures). Trance healer who transforms into an animal (at least metaphysically) is almost a trope I think?
If I had to guess about humans being modified for environmentalist reasons in the future, it would be mental changes to be able to predict extremely complex changes in organisms and climate. Though maybe people (partly computerized) who could actually see microorganisms would be interesting.
I've played with the idea of people modified to handle higher temperatures, but the changes would probably need to be very cheap.
Emmm. I'd guess tolerance for sedentary occupations (coder, truck driver, forklift driver, pilot - especially if those jobs go remote) which might include cardio vascular and would probably include eyes & urinary modification.
I don't see any current predictions sufficient to require increased high temp modifications - it's not like we don't already have people living in Pheonix, Vegas, San Antonio, and Havana.
More likely, though, than deliberate changes for the environment would be deliberate changes for human interaction - like steroids for combating Dad bod, facelifts & botox, high heels & pushup bras. We are long past the point where the environment is the day to day opponent in our lives.
Well, if you want to look *well* into the future, in 200-500 million years the Sun will become too bright for life on Earth (as we know it), so some significant adaptation will be necessary. And looking even further, when the Sun expands to become a red giant, presumably the only habitable worlds left will be the outer icy moons, which will become much warmer, and possessed of liquid water, but which will at least initially have a strong reducing chemistry (and high radiation) inhospitable to us as we are now.
Without knowing the proposed mechanism, I couldn't say, but I'm doubtful. The evolution of the Sun happens for pretty basic reasons -- it runs out of H to fuse and isn't big enough to burn heavier elements.
One of the things that is interesting to me about what we have learned about the outer planets over the past 30 years is that they are potentially life-supporting locations that are currently in the deep freeze, so to speak. Many (Titan, Europa, Pluto) have water and light organic elements, so they would be just right for life as we know it -- if their temperature were raised 200K or so.
But that is what *will* happen, as the Sun gets brighter. At some point, Earth will be like Mercury, scorched into a barren cinder, while these outer planets will be warm and humid, just perfect for life. These later stages of the Sun's life will certainly last a long time, a good chunk of a billion years, perhaps. So it seems completely plausible that there will be a second act in life's appearance in this Solar System: after our world has turned to ashes, new life may arise on the outer planets and thrive for hundreds of millions of years.
It would make an interesting bit of fiction to write about creatures from 1,200 million years in the future on a lush living Pluto, say, speculating about whether life could ever have existed on the (now roasting barren rock) of the third planet, the way we wonder whether life could ever have existed on Mars a billion years ago. (And for that matter maybe it did: maybe *we* are the Second Act, and there is a Third Act to come.)
Pet peeve: Our _current_ launch capacity is enough to put enough micron-thick foil between the Earth and the Sun to keep up with solar brightening prior to the red giant stage.
Where R_sun = the radius of the Sun, R_earth = radius of the Earth, R_shade = radius of the sunshade, R_orbit = mean orbital radius of the Earth, and R_L1 equals the distance from Earth to L1 (about 1 million km), the only stable place you could put a sunshade.
That gives R_shade = 11,000 km. If we assume a thickness of 1 micron, that still gives us 380 million m^3 of sunshade material. If we assume it has the density of polyethylene (0.95 g/cm^3) that comes out to ~360 million metric tonnes to launch all the way to L1. That doesn't really feel like it's within current launch capability.
Many thanks for the calculation! Yes, roughly 360 million metric tons, added bit by bit over roughly 500 million years (roughly when the brightening would cook us), calls for roughly 0.72 tons per year, which is within our current launch capacity, to the best of my knowledge.
“But it’s better for us not to know the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so very good at one particular thing…the actual facts of the sacrifices repel us when we see them: basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up with bovine hormones until they collapse or explode. We prefer not to consider closely the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews or to consider what impoverishments in one’s mental life would allow people actually to think the way great athletes seem to think. Note the way ‘up close and personal’ profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life–outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what’s obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It’s farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child’s world, is very small…[Tennis player Michael] Joyce is, in other words, a complete man, though in a grotesquely limited way…Already, for Joyce, at twenty-two, it’s too late for anything else; he’s invested too much, is in too deep. I think he’s both lucky and unlucky. He will say he is happy and mean it. Wish him well.”
Well that’s a pile of BS - I can introduce you to elite athletes who are also engineers, musicians and all round lovely people. Sure it’s hard work training but if it’s really all-consuming you’re doing it wrong and probably at risk of burnout.
What is your definition of elite? I would say it is incredibly difficult (sure, its not impossible) to be a top 100-200 in any major sport and also be an accomplished engineer or musician.
While there are those cases, there are counterpoint cases, and you can tell that there's more to the elite athlete based on what becomes of them afterwards. I don't know so much about elite athletes but I read a bunch of bios of elite figure skaters and ballet dancers, and at least some go on to college, families, separate careers. It's also probably true that some sports are more all-consuming than others. For example, I think it's easier to have a life outside of your sport and still achieve great heights if you train a martial art than, perhaps, elite soccer.
That's a bit over the top. I think it may be true for some segment of top athletes, for sure, but many of the very best are born with some kind of weird athletic gift and they don't actually have to become drudges to win. When I listen to Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps or even Shaq they seem like pretty together guys, albeit driven to excel and possessed of self-discipline at an astounding level. In general they also seem above-average in intelligence, which doesn't surprise me as the head game is quite important at the elite level.
This doesn't seem to hold up. Arnold Schwarzenegger seems like a highly intelligent and driven man. Michael Jordan was able to retire gracefully and continue expanding his wealth through smart investments. Michael Phelps seems like an all-around normal guy who just happens to be an Olympic gold medalist, with no severe deficiencies in any other areas of life. Even Alex Rodriguez, who suffered some serious leg injuries due to his baseball career, seems to have made a full recovery and appears to be doing quite well for himself in retirement.
The *only* sports where I see the phenomenon Wallace is describing with any regularity are football, boxing, and WWE-style "pro-wrestling" (which involves a lot more hits and slams than traditional wrestling). And I'd imagine that's because those particular sports often involve taking hard blows to the head on a regular basis, resulting in traumatic brain injuries. Pro-wrestler Chris Benoit, who killed his family and then himself in a fit of rage, had severe brain damage; autopsy revealed that his brain resembled that of "an 80 year old with Alzheimer's." OJ Simpson was given a mental competency test when he was on trial for murder and found to have an IQ of only 80, despite showing no signs of especially low intelligence earlier in life; since then, his mental condition only seems to have gotten worse. It's pretty clear that these problems are a result of direct physical trauma to the brain, rather than any broader tendency for athletes in general to neglect their social and intellectual development as Wallace is claiming.
I was surprised not to see, in the speculations section, any mention of the vast (percentage, at least) increase of trans-sexual medical procedures in the past ten years, disproportionately among young women. Is that simply because you don’t see a connection to any power structures of the kinds that the book described?
‘I Would Love to Sing Lucia’: A Male Soprano Comes Into His Own
Samuel Mariño, a singer with a rare voice type in opera, is making his Decca album debut with a glimpse at a more gender-fluid future.
By J.S. Marcus
May 27, 2022
BERLIN — Samuel Mariño is a rarity in opera: a true male soprano.
Rather than relying on falsetto as a countertenor would, Mariño, 28, is able to comfortably sing high notes with his chest voice. Now he is branching out from Baroque parts originally written for castrati. A big step in that direction: “Sopranista,” his debut album on the Decca label, which is out on Friday.
He has his eye on a variety of roles, including Sophie, the ingénue of Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier,” and Dvorak’s Rusalka, he said in an interview, with the aim of sending a message that classical music should be “open to all communities,” including a multiplicity of genders. And “Sopranista,” named after the Italian term for a male soprano, offers a glimpse at that more fluid future.
I doubt he is an author much recommended here, but Kingsley Amis' book The Alteration is an interesting alternative history tale (likely inspired by Keith Roberts' Pavane) about castrati surviving to the present day in a world where there had been no Reformation.
<i>That Catholic doctrine also happened to forbid bodily mutilation was only a minor inconvenience; there was, fortunately, a loophole—it was allowed in cases of medical necessity. This led to all kinds of fabricated stories in which an accident damaged the genitalia and castration was deemed necessary in order to save the boy’s life. The stories usually centered around animals—falls from horses, attacks by wild boar, or, hilariously, bites on the junk by wild swans (“Swans, we should remember, where renowned in mythic and lyric traditions for singing while dying”)—and also frequently involved perilous male activities such as horseback riding or hunting in order to allow the castrato to save face and maintain something of a masculine reputation.</i>
That makes me curious -- have there been any attempts to estimate how many castrati were originally castrated for (what the doctors thought were) genuine medical reasons vs. how many cases were fabricated? All the modern sources I've come across seem to assume that all cases were fabrications, but I'm not sure the castrato would really "save face" by appealing to a story that everybody knew was made up.
This was a good review, and I felt like a I learnt some interesting things despite already being familiar with the Castrati and some of the details you bring up. It feels like you have a clear fascination with your subject matter along with a sense of humour in approaching it, and I found really endearing. The tie-in at the end to preoccupations familiar to readers of this blog was well done.
The only critical feedback I might give is that in the last section, your enthusiasm, combined with the bits in brackets, sort of conspired together to make the text seem less serious. Honestly I think the speculative part of the essay makes some good points, and I think you should give yourself a little bit more room to develop these ideas in full, without seeming breathless.
I see some people don't like the concluding thoughts - I enjoyed that it really wrapped back around to the mutant angle in a way that was very provocative.
First of the finalists that I was actively disappointed with. The subject is interesting of course, but mostly just as a curiosity; the attempt to tie it to transhumanism at the end felt thin. The whole review did, actually. It was mostly a summary of the book's contents, engaging with the data and presentation only superficially. I wasn't a fan of the overly-casual voice, either. I know it's snooty of me, but when the reviewer wrote "my conscious is clear" I sniggered and thought "you're darn right it is".
All that being said, the review was concretely informative on many points. I especially appreciated how it wasn't trying to fit any narrative but just focused on faithfully bringing out the complexities and unexpected properties of the subject matter. It wasn't badly executed either, except by comparison with the very high standard of the other finalists.
The analogy to football players is insightful, but I can’t be the only one who got to “Lessons and Speculations” expecting *some* mention of the ways this history does-or-does-not bear on the practice of giving sterilizing cross-sex hormones to children. I feel almost baited.
trans hormone therapy is explicitly mentioned in the quote from SlimeMoldTimeMold
As an extremely brief throwaway mention with no follow-up, with no discussion of them as analogical (or not analogical) to the castrati.
True! Hey, at least it is there... The discussion could go in a very wide set of directions (particularly if one includes adult body modifications). From all the things athletes (not just in football) do, to variations on birth control, to laser vision correction, to bariatric surgery, to all the other options briefly cited in SlimeMoldTimeMold's quote.
What else is there to be said? The article was about body modification in the service of entertainment and profit, not just about body modification in general. So the football analogy fits, whereas trans hormone treatment really doesn't, since it's not something that happens as part of an active effort to create unnaturally talented entertainers.
Re the profit case - The "court mage" speculation is interesting... My impression was that nootropics are not powerful enough / predictable enough / selective enough to make this plausible in the near term. I think it be another analogous case, if it were technically feasible.
( Another fictional literature reference: The 'focused' in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Deepness_in_the_Sky )
The issue with trying to boost people's *intelligence* for exploitative purposes - as opposed to exploiting their singing abilities or athletic talent - is that intelligent people are both more likely to realize they're being exploited and more capable of doing something about it. The situation you're describing would probably not end well for the elites hoping to profit off an army of exploited geniuses: More likely, the geniuses would end up exploiting those elites instead, pretending to be brilliant-yet-humble servants while actually turning the resources of their elite masters toward their own ends. Or they'd simply rise up and overthrow the elites outright. The elites could try to retain control through ideology, or religion, or an engineered drug addiction that keeps their genius-slaves dependent on them, or implanted cortex bombs, maybe just good old-fashioned shackles, but I don't imagine any of those things will be effective for long when dealing with people who have literally superhuman levels of intelligence.
So the situation you describe seems unlikely to happen, and if it does happen, it almost certainly won't last for long. In fact, I think humans with significantly enhanced intelligence are far more likely to end up being a threat to everyone else than any A.I. supercomputer. Sure, the A.I. might have an IQ of 3000 while the enhanced human "only" has an IQ of 300, but the A.I. has no reason to actually *do* anything on its own initiative, while the enhanced human has all the same messy and sometimes dangerous drives as a regular human, just with a far greater capacity to actually pursue their possibly-hostile goals. The A.I. is also stuck in a box, whereas the enhanced human has a body that's at least as good as a normal human's and probably better (either because they were designed with enhanced physiology to go along with their enhanced intelligence, or because they figured out how to enhance their own bodies), allowing them far greater freedom and agency.
I mostly agree with your first point. Keeping control of a human who is smarter than the human attempting to keep control is generally unstable. The literary hypothetical example in Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" posits "focused" people who are a bit more like special purpose AI - modified to be obsessive on a particular specialty. If this were feasible, the modified person would be less of a threat to their ruler than a more generally intelligent person would be.
Re an AI with an IQ of 3000 being less of a threat than a person with an IQ of 300: I disagree. If an organization builds or purchases an AI, presumably the organization intends to _do_ something with that AI, to set it some goal. At that point, all the usual questions about what instrumental subgoals will be generated and what the AI will do to pursue them come into play. And the usual "alignment" issues come up: If one of the AI's subsubgoals is something no one anticipated, and it has side effects no human wants, but the AI is smart enough to achieve this subsubgoal - oops, too bad. ( Personally, I think that this is eventually what is going to happen. )
Re not having a body: Drones exist. Things like the Boston Dynamics "dog" bodies exist. Remote-controlled machinery exists. It won't be _trivially_ easy for a more-or-less runaway AI to get lots of control over physical objects, but it is basically a computer security question. If the security of the computer directly controlling the physical machinery is breakable, and the AI is smart enough, and one of its subsubgoals calls for control of that machinery, then it will eventually get control.
"More likely, the geniuses would end up exploiting those elites instead, pretending to be brilliant-yet-humble servants while actually turning the resources of their elite masters toward their own ends."
See: court eunuchs everywhere, from Byzantium (where the emperors had to take steps to limit their power and authority) to China.
Or indeed, any powerful officials who manage to replace the ostensible monarch or emperor as de facto supreme authority, reducing the emperor to a figurehead in whose name they rule. The shogunate in Japan and the Peshwa of the Maratha Empire in India (nominally they were prime ministers under the king but in effect they were the actual rulers), for examples of this.
Discarding all ethics, I suppose the correct technique for one who wanted to exploit a super-intelligent human would be to try to create, not an improvement of general ability, but the correct combination of superability and disability to create an idiot-savant skilled in a particular area of interest but utterly incapable of functioning on their own- a Rain Man, not a Merlin.
I think the argument would be more along the lines of parents consenting to body modifications for their children in the hopes of raising their social standing.
Nit: One could view the article as being about
body modification in the service of entertainment and profit of minors' reproductive organs
and the generalize in any of several directions by dropping various restrictions.
One direction is indeed
body modification in the service of entertainment and profit.
Another direction is
body modification of minors' reproductive organs.
Yeah but the argument from people who are horrified by the practice is that it's done for the same broader purpose: fame and attention.
That sounds like a strawman.
Not unless you abuse the definition, no.
I thought m-to-f increased the risk of osteoporosis, since women-from-birth are also more likely to get it.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6487870/ concludes:
"There has been a recent increasing interest in both the short and long term effects of sex steroid hormones on bone health in transgender persons. Based on the available data, hormone therapy appears to maintain or improve bone density in transgender adults in short term follow-up. For transgender children and adolescents, there is concern that GnRH agonist use prior to the initiation of sex steroid hormones may put patients at risk for worsening bone density."
Don't worry, all the comments will be about that anyway.
Morally, there's a big difference between a consenting 16 year old taking cross-sex hormones and selling an unwilling 8-12 year old to the church to be castrated.
Practically, the hormone profile that trans people are aiming for when they go on HRT is either testosterone or estrogen dominant, unlike that of the eununch who doesn't have much of either. This avoids complications such as osteoporosis.
What makes you think the 8-12 year olds were unwilling? I would guess quite the contrary, that they were told glamorous stories of the life of a castrato -- rubbing elbows with the emperor and pope, forsooth! -- and of course they would be generally unable to comprehend what the loss of adult sexuality meant -- there is hardly an 8 year old, and often 12 year olds, who doesn't think the oppposite sex "yucky."
...and if you protest that the 8-12 year old can hardly be said to give *informed* consent because they're just freaking kids...well, that would be the issue with the consent of the modern 16-year-old, too.
Also, it's not even like 8-12 year olds aren't being given hormones nowadays. The whole point of puberty blockers is to take them before puberty, after all.
which, in turn, raises the question of what happens if the kid just keeps taking them?
I certainly didn't expect that analogy, and it worked out better than the obvious angle. A lot depends on details we largely don't know (what exactly _is_ the long-time effect of puberty blockers, for instance?).
Great piece!
One random quibble: the X-Men comparison at the beginning really didn't work for me. It activated my nerdy quibbling reflexes without really adding anything.
The relationship between official church condemnation of castration and many of the people involved seeing it as an almost sacred act is fascinating. Reminds me very much of modern Americans saying they have religious objections to vaccination even as the official leaders of their denominations endorse vaccination drives.
I'm not a comic nerd and even I found the X-Men thing to be nonsensical and detracting from the rest of the work. I almost stopped reading there.
I thought it was fine (it’s not the author’s comparison, either). The X-Men comparison helped set the stage for the Castrati’s social role; a class of people that are used and admired for their abilities but also reviled for their differences. Maybe it went on too long would be the only problem I had.
My problem is that it felt kind of random, like a high school essay writer trying to hard. There isn't any *special* connection between castratii and xmen, and the comparison doesn't provide any new information, and there are obvious differences that undermine the random dot-connecting, some even acknowledged in the text. I think the key problem with something like this is that you could pick a large number of things other than xmen and make an equally strong and illuminating argument, which is to say that there is no argument.
This is more like one of those "take two things that are vaguely similar, list all the similarities, ignore the differences, and then pretend that this counts as insight and BS your way to an A" essays. The fact that the reference it is badly trying to shoehorn in is pop culture doesn't exactly do it in favors either, since it makes it seem like either an essay writer with small reference pools, or something trying to be "with it" to connect to the audience without understanding what they are talking about.
Ditto. I read that paragraph, walked away, and only came back a couple of days later.
I refer to M-to-F autogynephilic transsexuals "ex-men," partly for the science fiction allusion, but also because readers tend to find the term less confusing than more orthodox jargon like "transwomen." "Ex-men" is like how golf announcers on TV used to refer to "right-breaking putts" for ones aimed left of the hole, but eventually settled on "left to right-breaking putts" as less confusing to listeners.
"Transwoman" leaves a lot of people thinking "oh, she is a woman who has announced she is trans," whereas "ex-man," like "left-to-right breaking putt," is self-evident.
What brings that up?
Also, you should stop and instead just use the term people will understand and won't take as an insult.
+1. Transwoman is perfectly clear. This says more about the confusion of Steve Sailer than the audience.
It's not quite that simple-- I find that transwoman and transman take some extra processing power compared to mtf and ftm. I'm willing to accommodate what people what to be called, but that doesn't mean the difficulty doesn't exist.
Speak for yourself. I often find that I have to come up short and work out whether a "transwoman" is a man who's transitioned into a woman or a woman who's announced that she's trans.
How can it be so hard to remember that it's the former and not the latter?
I don't agree. I find the term bizarre. Either you're a woman or you're not. It's a state of being, not a process where the history matters.
Why assume that people are definitely women or not women?
Who said I assumed it? I learned it, by studying biology, the natural world, et cetera. It's an observation, not a theory. If I study a cat or an elephant, it is either male or female, full stop. I do not need to ask the cat or elephant its feelings or inquire into its history to make the determination. Every cell in its body is stamped with the mark.
Now if someone wants to invent a separate category of characterization that has some resemblance to biological sex -- say, encompasses typical social behavior, psychology, et cetera, which are often predictable consequences of sex -- and if the inventors want to say a person's placement in *this* category depends on his or her self-image or history I have no objection. Have at it. If I find the new distinction useful, I'll be happy to use it myself.
But hijacking an existing concept and word for the purpose is just being an annoying and discourteous Newspeak dictioneer, someone who degrades rather than improves communication by obfuscating the language to suit ideological aims.
As a retired programmer, I've run into _lots_ of situations where I (or other programmers on the team) had originally though we could describe something as a single bit, but exceptions turned up and we needed a richer data structure with more alternatives for accuracy.
A person with XY chromosomes and high estrogen levels has both similarities to and differences from both a central example of a cis_woman and a central example of a cis_man. "Transwoman" seems like a reasonable term for capturing part of that information.
> What brings that up?
“ex-men” sounds like “X-men”, presumably. In some sense it also works for castrati.
The (“Music to soothe the Mad King”) link is broken.
"Now that my conscious is clear, let’s turn to the other end of the spectrum: those rock star castrati like Farinelli who brushed shoulders with the upper crust of society."
Should be "conscience is clear"
IIRC the Chinese imperial eunuchs had their junk entirely cut off. A much more gruesome procedure with a much higher fatality rate.
Ancient China: doing the job right by throwing human lives at the problem since 2,000 BC.
Yeah, castrati and eunuchs are different things entirely. The reviewer should know that and make the distinction clear. Castration is grotesque but relatively survivable. The mutilation required to produce a eunuch when practiced without modern medical procedures had a high mortality rate.
Lousy review.
Some eunuchs had their penises removed, but that is not part of the definition of a eunuch. Castrati were eunuchs.
I was also thinking in terms of the immense power of an emperor that he could demand such sacrifice. But presumably that part of the allure for billionaires to buy sports teams.
What interests me is the rise of the counter-tenor, and there are some really excellent singers. Since there were no more castrati to sing those roles, many of them became 'breeches roles' where mezzo-sopranos and altos took them on. Now the pendelum is swinging back to cast men in those roles once more, but counter-tenors.
Here is Philippe Jarousky as a suitably creepy Nero from "L'incoronazione di Poppea"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_isL0E-4TsQ
My personal favourite, Andreas Scholl with "Ombra mai fu" from 'Xerxes':
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWgISsML2BI
I kept thinking of counter-tenor while reading the review, too. There's pop music with counter-tenor vocals, too (to no one's surprise, I imagine): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S11k94ioTh8
Here's a favorite of mine, the titular role in Akhnaten by Philip Glass: https://youtu.be/0ouiyjJ9LVU?t=78
Once again, time for a relevant fiction recommendation! Vernon Lee's story from her 1895 collection "Hauntings", titled 'A Wicked Voice' about a composer haunted and indeed obsessed with an 18th castrato who was exactly this liminal figure, half-angel and half-devil, who could literally kill with his voice:
https://www.berfrois.com/2014/10/wicked-voice-vernon-lee/
"Singer, thing of evil, stupid and wicked slave of the voice, of that instrument which was not invented by the human intellect, but begotten of the body, and which, instead of moving the soul, merely stirs up the dregs of our nature! For what is the voice but the Beast calling, awakening that other Beast sleeping in the depths of mankind, the Beast which all great art has ever sought to chain up, as the archangel chains up, in old pictures, the demon with his woman’s face? How could the creature attached to this voice, its owner and its victim, the singer, the great, the real singer who once ruled over every heart, be otherwise than wicked and contemptible? But let me try and get on with my story.
...I can see all my fellow-boarders, leaning on the table, contemplating the print, this effeminate beau, his hair curled into ailes de pigeon, his sword passed through his embroidered pocket, seated under a triumphal arch somewhere among the clouds, surrounded by puffy Cupids and crowned with laurels by a bouncing goddess of fame. I hear again all the insipid exclamations, the insipid questions about this singer:—”When did he live? Was he very famous? Are you sure, Magnus, that this is really a portrait,” &c. &c. And I hear my own voice, as if in the far distance, giving them all sorts of information, biographical and critical, out of a battered little volume called The Theatre of Musical Glory; or, Opinions upon the most Famous Chapel-masters and Virtuosi of this Century, by Father Prosdocimo Sabatelli, Barnalite, Professor of Eloquence at the College of Modena, and Member of the Arcadian Academy, under the pastoral name of Evander Lilybaean, Venice, 1785, with the approbation of the Superiors. I tell them all how this singer, this Balthasar Cesari, was nick-named Zaffirino because of a sapphire engraved with cabalistic signs presented to him one evening by a masked stranger, in whom wise folk recognized that great cultivator of the human voice, the devil; how much more wonderful had been this Zaffirino’s vocal gifts than those of any singer of ancient or modern times; how his brief life had been but a series of triumphs, petted by the greatest kings, sung by the most famous poets, and finally, adds Father Prosdocimo, “courted (if the grave Muse of history may incline her ear to the gossip of gallantry) by the most charming nymphs, even of the very highest quality.”
...I realized my delusion when, on rounding the point of the Giudecca, the murmur of a voice arose from the midst of the waters, a thread of sound slender as a moonbeam, scarce audible, but exquisite, which expanded slowly, insensibly, taking volume and body, taking flesh almost and fire, an ineffable quality, full, passionate, but veiled, as it were, in a subtle, downy wrapper. The note grew stronger and stronger, and warmer and more passionate, until it burst through that strange and charming veil, and emerged beaming, to break itself in the luminous facets of a wonderful shake, long, superb, triumphant.
...How well I knew that voice! It was singing, as I have said, below its breath, yet none the less it sufficed to fill all that reach of the canal with its strange quality of tone, exquisite, far-fetched.
They were long-drawn-out notes, of intense but peculiar sweetness, a man’s voice which had much of a woman’s, but more even of a chorister’s, but a chorister’s voice without its limpidity and innocence; its youthfulness was veiled, muffled, as it were, in a sort of downy vagueness, as if a passion of tears withheld.
...He struck a few chords and sang. Yes, sure enough, it was the voice, the voice that had so long been persecuting me! I recognized at once that delicate, voluptuous quality, strange, exquisite, sweet beyond words, but lacking all youth and clearness. That passion veiled in tears which had troubled my brain that night on the lagoon, and again on the Grand Canal singing the Biondina, and yet again, only two days since, in the deserted cathedral of Padua. But I recognized now what seemed to have been hidden from me till then, that this voice was what I cared most for in all the wide world.
The voice wound and unwound itself in long, languishing phrases, in rich, voluptuous rifiorituras, all fretted with tiny scales and exquisite, crisp shakes; it stopped ever and anon, swaying as if panting in languid delight. And I felt my body melt even as wax in the sunshine, and it seemed to me that I too was turning fluid and vaporous, in order to mingle with these sounds as the moonbeams mingle with the dew."
To my taste, this seems like a spectacular overreaction to a voice - but I'm a retired programmer, not a composer, and it is common to many professions to (from an outsider's view) overemphasize the concerns and tools of their profession. ( I'm also taking Vernon Lee's depiction of her composer character at her word - and it is perfectly within a writer's right to overdramatize their characters, as they see fit. Poe and Lovecraft certainly did. )
Ah, you have to remember that Lee is writing a ghost/horror story. The composer is one of the new style who follow Wagner and he is all for instrumental music over the primacy of the voice, and despises the old-fashioned 18th century exaltation of extraordinary singers for their vocal talents and not for following the music. So the castrati, and this Zaffirino, are the examples of all that he hates and repudiates in his music.
That he then ends up haunted/obsessed with that voice, and its seductive, magical and unnatural power and beauty, due to what is a dream or vision or seeing a haunting of the time (there's enough ambiguity to what happens) is the revenge of the singer, who is depicted as being in his time very proud and vengeful and who did take revenge on those who insulted him. The composer has mocked and insulted him, so the revenge is that from then on, after his fever dream/ghost vision, the composer is unable to write anything in his cherished new style but only in the 18th century style of excessive (as he thinks) deference to the voice.
And it's important that Zaffirino is a castrato, is neither man nor woman but somewhere in between, as that aids with the whole idea of a surviving vengeful ghost who had power to kill with his voice in his lifetime, and to possess a living man after his death. The implied (and overt) sensuality is important element too; the composer prefers writing instrumental music since instruments do not produce their sounds out of flesh and blood and are therefore 'purer' and more 'spiritual' - it's the whole Wagnerian-school ideal of Art above all; " Wagner (1813–1883) decried the Italian singing model, alleging that it was concerned merely with "whether that G or A will come out roundly". He advocated a new, Germanic school of singing that would draw "the spiritually energetic and profoundly passionate into the orbit of its matchless Expression."
The revenge of the castrato voice is to pull the composer back into the world of flesh and blood, of love and revenge, of sensual effects on the body and being reduced to emotion and longing and desire, not carried off into the heavens by some ethereal, spiritual experience. It's seductive and dangerous, diabolic in one sense.
That's what I think Lee is going for there, anyway 😁
Many Thanks for the detailed explanation!
Hmm - so the instrumental / vocal conflict could be viewed partially as a factional / ideological dispute? Viewed from today's perspective, there is a certain irony now that both forms of music are stored as digital data, and mostly presented to the listener through digital-to-analog converters and electromagnets driving speakers. It would be amusing to hear both Zaffirino's and Lee's composer's reactions to this development.
In the absence of recording technology, I have a mild preference for instrumental music, as the absence of a hard link to the detailed anatomy of a singer makes it slightly less perishable. But, since recording technology does exist in our time, this doesn't really matter. I find the concern about whether the sounds arise out of flesh and blood or not somewhat amusing ... After all, the _appreciation_ of the sounds, for either vocal or instrumental music, depends on human central nervous system responses.
One comment about Zaffirino's liminal state as a castrato: If one looks at a large enough numbers of parameters/features for a given person, one will usually find _some_ aspect of them which sits in between neat categories. If there are a hundred significant aspects (sexual, other physiological, professional, religious, dietary, ideological,...) to someone, and a 10% probability that any aspect falls in a grey area, then more than 99.99% of people are in _some_ grey area.
I'll take the responsibility on myself to point out that there is no University of Indiana. It's Indiana University.
Excellent contribution
But Ball State is still called Ball U, right?
I've heard they are the leading authority on ligma.
I only know about it because David Letterman is an alum. He mentioned the Ball U designation in passing on one of his late shows.
Hmm, I wonder if there's been any effort to recruit people with androgen insensitivity (or other endocrine disorders affecting testosterone) to be singers. We could hear what a castrato sounds like without the castration.
edit: upon further thought androgen insensitivity wouldn't produce the castrato phenotype since the estrogen would still affect bones, etc. Plus, as Peter Shenkin points out these people usually present as female.
A better model might be hypogonadism, such as Kallmann syndrome (hypogonadotropic) or LH insensitivity (hypergonadotropic).
There are a few sopranists (men who sing in soprano range, higher than countertenor) who are believed to be natural castrati, due to naturally-occuring endocrine abnormalities.
Radu Marian is one of them.
I was a bit surprised to read that "under the influence of testicular secretion, the vocal cords increase in length by 67% in males and 24% in females (Jenkins, 2000)." I'm guessing "testicular" should read "testosterone", since women do secrete some testosterone, but typically not in testicles.
Thank you for the link! I was unaware of this singer, and he does have a completely different quality of voice to even a counter-tenor. A voice like a boy treble, but clearly mature. If the castrati sang anything like this, no wonder their voices were considered unearthly and unattainable except by supreme sacrifice.
Also lurking somewhere on YouTube is this spectacularly mislabeled recording, purported to be of Radu Marian at age 7, but really of Goar Gasparyan, an Armenian soprano, singing the Queen of the Night's vengeance aria:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-UYRbNRdi4
And she does have a more "treble" sound than is usual for a grown woman. She's also less breathy than Marian is on coloratura passages:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FdM2pyQWtI
Which I think is interesting! On sustained notes, Radu sounds so young and... buoyant... that I would not expect breathy coloratura passages! That is, it's normal for young singers to sound breathy on those passages, but I had supposed that was due more to inexperience than physiology.
Perhaps it is inexperience at that. Plenty of professional sopranos are *not* known for clear, rapid-fire melismas, but blur, warble, or cluck them, and they still have careers. Some have been divas. That said, there seem to be more professionals than ever who do nail their melismas. One I know of started her career as a clucker, and is now a nailer. She has a nice career, and is well-regarded, but is hardly famous, just standard for her specialty these days.
I think the 'warbling' - and this is totally ignorant, uneducated guessing on my part - may be down to the training; that the expressive, emotional, acting/interpretation tradition started and so the emphasis was on the 'sob in the voice' and developing vibrato - this Wikipedia article on 'bel canto' seems to put the style change for the newer 19th century 'realist' composers and librettists:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bel_canto#19th-century_Italy_and_France
"The popularity of the bel canto style as espoused by Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini faded in Italy during the mid-19th century. It was overtaken by a heavier, more ardent, less embroidered approach to singing that was necessary to perform the innovative works of Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) with maximum dramatic impact. Tenors, for instance, began to inflate their tone and deliver the high C (and even the high D) directly from the chest rather than resorting to a suave head voice/falsetto as they had done previously – sacrificing vocal agility in the process. Sopranos and baritones reacted in a similar fashion to their tenor colleagues when confronted with Verdi's drama-filled compositions. They subjected the mechanics of their voice production to greater pressures and cultivated the exciting upper part of their respective ranges at the expense of their mellow but less penetrant lower notes. Initially at least, the singing techniques of 19th-century contraltos and basses were less affected by the musical innovations of Verdi, which were built upon by his successors Amilcare Ponchielli (1834–1886), Arrigo Boito (1842–1918) and Alfredo Catalani (1854–1893).
One reason for the eclipse of the old Italian singing model was the growing influence within the music world of bel canto's detractors, who considered it to be outmoded and condemned it as vocalization devoid of content. To others, however, bel canto became the vanished art of elegant, refined, sweet-toned musical utterance. Rossini lamented in a conversation that took place in Paris in 1858 that: "Alas for us, we have lost our bel canto". Similarly, the so-called German style was as derided as much as it was heralded. In the introduction to a collection of songs by Italian masters published in 1887 in Berlin under the title Il bel canto, Franz Sieber wrote: "In our time, when the most offensive shrieking under the extenuating device of 'dramatic singing' has spread everywhere, when the ignorant masses appear much more interested in how loud rather than how beautiful the singing is, a collection of songs will perhaps be welcome which – as the title purports – may assist in restoring bel canto to its rightful place."
In the late-19th century and early-20th century, the term "bel canto" was resurrected by singing teachers in Italy, among whom the retired Verdi baritone Antonio Cotogni (1831–1918) was a pre-eminent figure. Cotogni and his followers invoked it against an unprecedentedly vehement and vibrato-laden style of vocalism that singers increasingly used after around 1890 to meet the impassioned demands of verismo writing by composers such as Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924), Ruggero Leoncavallo (1857–1919), Pietro Mascagni (1863–1945), Francesco Cilea (1866–1950) and Umberto Giordano (1867–1948), as well as the auditory challenges posed by the non-Italianate stage works of Richard Strauss (1864–1949) and other late-romantic/early-modern era composers, with their strenuous and angular vocal lines and frequently dense orchestral textures."
What made me think about this was an interview years (decades) back with Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys, where he discussed his voice and when he was learning to sing, and how he was told he had a voice better suited for Baroque than other styles.
I took a STEM rather than music major at college because STEM was the "sensible choice" and I'm chronically sickly, which, for all the romantic tales of tubercular musicians and whatnot, makes performing music *much* more impractical (prolly why it's so romantic). But I was reasonably involved in the music department.
As I understand it, "healthy vibrato" is, above all, practical. It's less fatiguing and aids cutting through to be heard over accompaniment. Vibrato is also an expressive choice, but music isn't lacking for other expressive choices, and needlessly paining yourself or the listener with chronic vibrato because you think it's "expressive" is frowned on.
Despite lore, there seems no evidence that each person has one true, "natural" voice that needs to be "liberated" in order to sing best, but whether by birth or cumulative accidents of training (I'd bet both), singers typically develop a voice "size" and tone quality that they're comfortable with, and it usually pains the audience more if singers stray too much from their comfort zone. Singing more beautifully often *feels* like finding and "liberating" some "natural voice", even if that's not what's literally happening.
Along with this "natural voice" comes "natural vibrato". Some voices "naturally" have more of it than others, and, if accompaniment risks drowning you out, you can make your voice "bigger" by piling on the vibrato.
That, basically, is why "Wagner's music is better than it sounds." Most opera stars don't have voices big enough to cut through Wagnerian accompaniment without piling on the vibrato. A "true Wagnerian voice" will be big enough that it doesn't have to pile on quite so much, and the result sounds better — only, there are fewer of those voices than there are roles in Wagner operas, with predictable results. I've attended a few Wagner operas, and by far the one with the "best cast" was the one where the conductor paid the most attention to ensuring the orchestra didn't egg the singers into oversinging.
Producing clear ornamentation requires matching "natural vibrato" to the ornament somehow.
"Tapping" a note staccato (often shown off in coloratura arias) "naturally" puts less vibrato on the note, but it takes intense practice to run those "taps" together into melismas — and singers can expect to cluck unconvincingly until they've mastered it (if they ever do).
There's also legato approach to ornamentation. For example, it's usually easier to sing a passable trill by smoothly "widening the vibrato" than by thinking of bouncing rapidly between two notes. Melismas usually break naturally into smaller groups of notes. A clear attack on the first note in a group, followed by a vibrato wiggle that kindasorta approximates the rest of the notes in the group, sounds better to most people than clucking does, even if it's a bit "blurry", and consequently, it's what many professional singers do. If you do a convincing job of it, that's "bel canto", too.
Some singers master both Sturm und Drang on slower passages and clear, swift ornamentation, but between differences in "natural voice" and the fact that any time spent mastering one thing is time not spent on others, professionals typically do one better than the other. "Dramatic coloratura" roles call for both, but it's common for those roles to be filled by singers who aren't equally good at both. Diana Damrau is admired for having a voice that's unusually balanced between skill sets. For a coloratura, her voice is unusually "heavy", "womanly", and (if needed) "aggressive".
I was going to mention Radu Marian too. Here is a youtube link of him singing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYKEqsxDnV8
>since women do secrete some testosterone, but typically not in testicles.
The ovarian thecal cells produce some testosterone although androstenedione is the major ovarian androgen.
Since they did not have male sexual organs but vaginas (to external appearance), many were raised as women and identified as women.I heard of one case ca. 1980 of such a woman who, when she failed to menstruate, was given estrogen as a teen-ager, which caused her to develop breasts. She was happily married and enjoyed sex. But she got worried and saw a doctor to ask if she had some terrible illness, since she had never menstruated. He had genetic testing done and indeed she had androgen insensitivity. At the time I read the story, ca. 1980, the doctor did not tell her the origin of her condition. Rather, he assured her that she was suffering from no serious illness that would shorten her life.
I don't know if she sang and in what range or what she looked like; but it does raise the question why women in general, though they have higher voices, do not exhibit the physical characteristics (facial, for example) that lack of testosterone causes in castrati. Of course, women do produce some testosterone and are sensitive to it, so maybe that suffices to negate the production of those physical characteristics.
Women don't have the physical characteristics of castrati because those are due to a lack of estrogen, which is the hormone involved in the closure of the epiphyseal cartilages. Some women with primary hypogonadism do have elongated features, though
Androgen insensitivity is a feature of the androgen receptors. Patients with complete androgen insensitivity do produce testosterone, sometimes in very high amounts, and that testosterone is peripherally converted to estrogen, resulting in a female penotype
There's a singer I like whose stage name is Ethel Cain who was assigned male at birth but whose body didn't produce enough testosterone to change her voice and who now takes estrogen HRT, she has an excellent voice and might not be too far off (though not the same thing, either)
What were the historical origins of the castrato? Did the practice develop out of some older practices in the Byzantine Empire or Medieval Europe? Why was this practice done almost exclusively in Italy and not anywhere else in Europe?
I know right? Who was the first nutter who came up with the notion of castrating boys so they could sing better? It apparently was first done in the Byzantine empire, but that has no relation with the Italian castratti. How do you even sell this idea at first?
Maybe it starts with a genuinely accidental castration, and an unfortunate boy who goes on to become a singer. Then he grows old, or dies altogether, and whoever was profiting off the first boy's talents start to think, ‘if only, by some supreme stroke of luck, there was *another* "swan biting off a boy's junk" incident…’ until the idea occurs to him to give luck a little nudge of his own. (Or the same thing happens with the jealous priest of the nearby village, consumed with envy at his life-long rival's choir prodigy…)
Arab slavers often castrated the male African slaves that they took, so it wouldn't be much of a problem to observe how that affected their development.
The effect of castration on adult male voices would have been well known for centuries, as castration for other reasons was not unknown in the ancient world. I vaguely recall the Persian Empire might have done it on a larger scale than the Greco-Roman world.
Good point!
Perhaps Italy of that period had music which took better advantage of high voice.
To my eye the appearance of the Chinese eunochs depicted does not exhibit the special physical features that appear in the castrati shown. I've never heard this mentioned of the court eunochs of the middle east, who are generally described as obese, or at least overweight. I have also heard (don't ask me where, and maybe it's untrue) that these eunochs could and did get erections (as indeed pre-pubescent boys can) and even did indulge in sexual intercourse, though of course they could not procreate. However, the Wikipedia article on Eunuch does say that they were sometimes used as sexual partners.
a) Yup
b) nit: bear->sire
Why not just use woman guards then? Men tend to be stronger, sure, but it's already less important when fighting with weapons, and much of it is probably testosterone.
... I guess men are just cheaper in polygynous societies.
When fighting with melee weapons upper body strength is still very important. But yeah, men are cheap.
Well, if eunuchs can have sex, they can probably keep the harem happier. Of course, if they could pick the right female guards… hmmm….
Yup, I’ve always thought that since learning that eunuchs could have sex.
You can't really tell much about his body shape but to my eye the pictured Chinese eunuch does have the characteristically long limbs.
If I'm not mistaken, Chinese eunuchs were typically castrated as adults. So I would expect them to have ordinary skeletons and voices.
Thank you — I wasn't aware. (If it was said, I missed it!)
Yes, I wonder about that picture. To me that looks more like progeria than someone who is a eunuch:
https://www.oldest.org/people/people-with-progeria/
I wonder if Cartier-Bresson had a good translator or was there some confusion about who the person in the photo was? I could imagine them being part of the (former) Imperial court, but they might have been termed a 'eunuch' for lack of a better term for their condition.
Check out Octavia Butler's EarthSeed or Patternist series for exploration in these areas.
Future ecological collapse will propel the rise of militant eco-cults that use elaborate schemes of genetic modification, plastic surgery, and hormone therapy (and whatever else is needed) to create animal-human hybrids (think Thundercats or Stalking Cat) as a part of some master plan to bring about radical environmental restoration (steal this premise).
There is the 1994 movie about Farinelli (titled "Farinelli") which is great fun, plays a little fast and loose with history, but is wonderfully dramatic to get across the superstar status of this man at that time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YcQhnab7nA
I've often wondered: male tenors and countertenors are both rare and highly valued as singers. Are we going to start seeing musical families not castrating but doing slight hormone treatments to make sure their voice doesn't fully drop? You wouldn't need enough to sterilize them: most tenors can have children. But I believe (not a biologist) the deepness of your voice has something to do with the mix of hormones in your teenage years. At least for men.
Hmm... I wonder if one could get away with sticking something (medicated stent???) in the blood supply of the larynx? A _lot_ of limitations in medicine come from the circulatory system being well-mixed, when one often wants the effects of some molecule on organ A but not on organ B. Anyone know to what extent one can get around that?
Men who have the range of a tenor or even a countertenor are much more plentiful than men with those voice types who have highly trained voices, plus whatever physical "it factors" contribute to making their voice carry and be pleasant to listen to.
IIRC, some years back, some ENT MDs studied the physiology of classically-trained singers and came to the conclusion that theories as to what makes the vocal physiology of outstanding classical singers different from average physiology were mostly bunk.
Absence of obvious impediments like chronic sinusitis, laryngitis, respiratory problems, or "stage fright" obviously helps. Vocal nodes seem bad, but even there, plenty of singers sing with them, many say they find their voices improve when nodes are excised, but improvement upon excision doesn't seem a sure thing. (Excision forces vocal rest and rehab. I wonder what the results would be for placebo surgery paired with the same rest and rehab?)
Slightly emasculating a male teen's voice would not guarantee that teen's motivation to go through vocal training, nor would it ensure "naturally" pleasant, carrying tone production. High male voice types might be relatively rare in the general population, but they're plentiful compared to the number of men who make a career out of those voice types.
Some pop culture recommendations that might pair well with this essay: Songmaster, a science-fiction book about a boy sculpted and raised to be the greatest singer in the galaxy and his intersection with the space politics of his time. He's not a Castrato, but he is given drugs which inhibit his ability to fully undergo puberty and eventually cause huge complications. Furthermore, like the X-man analogy, its implied that his singing is SO good he's essentially some sort of low-level psychic broadcaster, able to override people's will and emotions with his singing. This is a book by Orson Scott Card, so it contains a lot of the weird child-abuse and homosexual panicky undertones that a lot of his work has, but many people consider it to be his best, and I would agree with that.
Also, "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," a film based on a stage show about a person who has undergone a botched gender-reassignment surgery and is grappling with the philosophical implications of that, while also trying to make it as a pop star in the United States. A lot of the music from the show explores the "liminal space" idea you talk about.
Hedwig has this great running metaphor of the scar of an incomplete separation - it arises in her botched surgery, in various references to Berlin and the wall, in "The Origin of Love" with the Aristophanes story about sexual orientation from Plato's Symposium, and probably in other places I'm not remembering at the moment.
Not to mention Paolo Bacigalupi‘s _The Fluted Girl_ (in _Pump 6 and other stories_) and every bit as horrific as all his fiction, but directly relevant to the concerns of the review.
I wanted to say "sounds like gay Macross" but apparently it predates the first Macross series by two years. I blame the 80s.
Also Macross is already pretty gay.
The K-pop industry is notorious for every part of this except the bio modifications. (Actually, if we add in plastic surgeries, it might be doing every part of this).
That's where my mind went too! And definitely, it's an open secret that most kpop stars are made to get plastic surgery.
Very cool review. I think the transhumanism angle at the end is an interesting little thought experiment or prediction, even if I disagree with the author's own speculations that follow. So far, though, we seem not to be headed in that direction at all. People who engage in extreme bodily modifications these days don't seem to have much of a higher purpose in mind. Those people who get their tongues split, for example, don't seem to have anything more complex in mind than "ooooooh, that looks cool because it's like a snake!" from what I can tell. I guess my point here is that our proto-transhumanists need to think bigger and better.
Imagine becoming a castrati in China and being told the next day "actually we're gonna stop using you."
In all seriousness, the above mentioned last surviving Chinese eunuch Sun Yaoting was castrated at age 8 months before the last Qing emperor was deposed. So basically that.
The last eunuchs actually had a (comparatively) comfortable job of being brought around by the Red Guard as a kind of human demonstration of the evil degeneracy of the Qing and the monarchy's corruption of the people. They got to live decently (for the context) and most of them died of old age.
Funnily enough, the same is true for Puyi, the last Qing emperor. After an (admittedly typical of Maoist China, e.g. full of varying levels of ritual humiliation) nine-year period of imprisonment by the Maoist government for his role in the Japanese occupation, he seemed to have a genuine change of heart towards Communist sympathies and lived a humble life as a street sweeper and sometime tour guide in the Imperial City while occasionally acting in propaganda films (including a few where he played himself). He even wrote his own state-sanctioned autobiography about his journey from the last Emperor of China to an avowed Maoist, which was originally supposed to have been ghostwritten. His original text (with censorship regarding his prison treatment) was kept because his prose was apparently so passionate and earnest that the propogandist chosen as his ghostwriter deemed his own draft the inferior work.
That is absolutely fascinating. You've inspired me to trace down and read his autobiography.
It's called "From Emperor to Citizen" in English (although it might also be listed under the literal translation of its title, the very simple "The First Half of My Life"), and it looks like it goes for around $15 on Amazon.
It looks like that is the Chinese version. Any thoughts on "The Last Manchu"?
I love these reviews! But I have an administrative suggestion: please put the book's full title and the name of the book's author, in the title of the review post.
I know that the titling of posts is a great kind of subtle art at ACX (and throughout Scott's writing in general) -- it's part of the "techne" (*) -- but the book title would make these reviews easier to index/find, and I feel like the author's name should get prominent billing.
Maybe substack has a "sub-heading" tag or attribute where this info shpuld go. I feel it should be more prominent. In fact, I am (pretty) sure that, in print media, it is required at the head of a review.
Besides that bit of administrivia, all the reviews in this year's pool have been epic, so fun, so much great work.
BRetty
* - I think of how suck.com started the use of embedded hyperlinks to make a kind of second voice running alongside the day's column. A voice that could be mocking or alarmist or an ESL translator devolving into Kabuki dumbshow or the feuding married couple doing the LAX announcements in the movie "Airplane" or sometimes just exactly what it really was;- snark.
What a brutal and horrific society we used to live in. Thank god that the monstrous people who used to participate in this process are all dead - hopefully soon to be followed by the people who participate in the modern-day equivalents.
MOD DECISION: Ban. This is just ambiguous enough that I might be reading too much into it, in which case feel free to appeal by the usual process.
Minor point, but it was distracting that "castrati" and "castrato" kept alternating singular and plural (and even "castrato's" once!)
I was going to post the same thing! If I was writing a review of a book called "The Castrato" about castrati, I would get my singulars and plurals right. This is culpable negligence.
to address the obvious confusion -- looks like the adrenal glands also produce a small amount of testosterone; you're not getting very far in terms of sex drive on none at all.
First review in quite a number of years of SSC reviews that had me order the book. (Last one I remember buying was "Seeing Like A State", fwiw.)
One thing that has not been mentioned in the review, but is nevertheless interesting, is that eunuchs and castrati seem to have lived much longer lives than average.
In Korea, for instance: "The average lifespan of eunuchs was 70.0 ± 1.76 years, which was 14.4–19.1 years longer than the lifespan of non-castrated men of similar socio-economic status. [...] Notably, the average lifespan of kings and male royal family members, who spent their whole lives inside the palace, was 47.0 ± 3.21 and 45.0 ± 2.79 years, respectively."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982212007129
The Castrati mentioned in the article didn't die young, either. Caffarelli and Senesino both lived to 72 or 73. Farinelli died at 77. Even the apparently grotesquely large Bernacchi lived to 71. Yet in the 18th century, per "Lifespans of the European Elite, 800–1800," the average adult European nobleman was most likely to die between the ages of 55 and 60.
It seems to me that there's a plausible biochemical reason for all of this. Testosterone activates the mTOR cellular signaling pathway, whereas caloric restriction (and presumably senolytics like metformin) suppress mTOR activation.
Seconded!
Slightly less dramatic if you use the more apples-to-apples comparison: "we compared the lifespan of eunuchs with the lifespan of men from three non-eunuch families of similar social status, who lived during the same time periods (Supplemental information). The average lifespan of the non-eunuchs ranged from 50.9 to 55.6 years"
So royalty had somewhat shorter lifespans than their non-eunuch courtiers? More stress maybe?
Living to 70 is not impressive even for a non-castrated male. Now if they reached their 90s on average...
The thing is, everything under the sun activates or suppresses mTOR and it seems to be the 2020s HDL as the biological acronym of choice to write excited headlines about.
"Living to 70 is not impressive even for a non-castrated male."
Well, apparently it was in that time and place.
The Korean eunuchs were compared to men of similar socioeconomic status, who lived markedly shorter lives on average.
It's also easy enough to get life expectancy tables for 17th and 18th century European upper-classes and the nobility. Adult males tended to die at around age 55-60. And if that is too abstract, simply compare the famous castrati to the most famous and noteworthy classical composers of that era: Beethoven died at 57, Schubert at age 31, Mozart at 35, J.S. Bach at 65, Chopin at 39, Vivaldi at 63, Paganini at 57, Pachelbel at 52. That the castrati mentioned in the article all seem to have lived beyond 70 is, in fact, remarkable.
And this all corresponds to the situation in 18th and early 19th century America, as well. Though the overall picture is somewhat murky, American universities have kept extremely good demographic data, and between 1785 and 1814 graduates of Yale College had a life expectancy at age 20 of 40.4 years. (That is, 40.4 years of remaining life, for an expected lifespan of 60.4 years.) Princeton fared slightly worse over that same period, at 36.2 years from age 20. There's some discussion of 19th century American mortality at PMC2885717.
While reading this, I wondered whether Andrzej Sapkowski (writer of "The Witcher") series drew any inspiration from the castrati when coming up with the eponymous Witchers. Both professions involve being subjected as a boy to a procedure with a significant mortality rate, in order to become superhumanly good at a specific task (singing, or hunting monsters). Both are prized for their skills while simultaneous being isolated for their differences. And both are rendered infertile by the procedure, yet assigned a significant level of sex appeal.
Admittedly, it could just be a coincidence, but you can certainly see the similarities.
What other examples are there?
Agent 47 in Hitman.
Black Widow (and by extension, the entire organization of Black Widows) in the Marvel movies are a gender-swapped example, they're made completely infertile through surgery because their Soviet/Russian Federation handlers don't want them getting pregnant.
A more conventional example would be the Unsullied in Game of Thrones, male eunuchs who are explicitly cut "root and stem" to prevent them from reproducing or having sex drives. Although the latter part is sometimes unsuccessful, since some of them are shown to still have sexual desires.
I think witchers being infertile is there just so Geralt can fuck a lot.
On the other hand Sapkowski is a huge history nerd so I wouldn't put the inspiration past him, though I have no idea how much he cares for Italian history in particular. His "Narrenturm" referred to basically nothing west of modern Germany and south of modern Czech Republic.
Sumo wrestling might offer a closer comparison than American football.
Teenage wrestlers leave home to live in a compound under the supervision of a retired wrestler. The wrestlers train for hours each day, do even more unusual things to their bodies than aspiring NFL players do, and obey a bunch of supposedly ancient prohibitions and duties. For example, no romantic relationships until they achieve a certain rank. (https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20150508-the-life-of-a-sumo-wrestler)
As you would expect, an observational study has found a "markedly higher rate of mortality [among wrestlers] from 35 to 74 years old" compared to the average Japanese male (https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jjh1946/50/3/50_3_730/_pdf/-char/ja).
Based on something I dimly remember reading, I think that the socioeconomic background of wrestlers tends to be below-average. I couldn't find verification.
>Based on something I dimly remember reading, I think that the socioeconomic background of wrestlers tends to be below-average. I couldn't find verification.
It's not at all a coincidence that out of the last 6 Yokozuna (highest) ranked wrestlers, 5 have been Mongolian.
That’s the sort of thing that can be interpreted in different ways. Sure, one interpretation is fewer choices; but a different interpretation is that decadent societies no longer inspire individuals to try for anything impressive but difficult, while pre-decadent societies have not reached that point.
Would modern Western society produce a Scott or an Amundsen? Unclear to me. And that’s very definitely not about “lower economic status”.
I think those reasons are probably two sides of the same coin. Japanese participation in sumo started falling in the 70s and 80s, as families whose children were basically guaranteed a middle class life (and who didn't have many children to begin with) became less willing to send their sons to a demanding, often thankless life in a sumo stable. Foreign recruitment began around that time. There was actually an American Yokozuna in the 90s. That being said, to your point, the recent dominance of Mongolians is still massively disproportionate compared to their overall representation.
There is also at least one unrelated reason for this. There is a traditional wrestling style, called Bokh, which is similar to sumo and is a huge freaking deal in Mongolia. Many successful Mongolian sumo wrestlers come from noted Bokh families. Mongolians tend to be over-represented in a variety of wrestling styles for this reason.
"One of the funnier aspects of the book is how hilariously Italian the names of all the castrati were. A few examples: Loreto Vittori, Atto Melani, Antonio Bernacchi, Francesco Bernardi ("Senesino"), Valentino Urbani, Giusto Fernando Tenducci, Girolamo Crescentini, Giovanni Battista "Giambattista" Velluti, Venanzio Rauzzini."
I'm from Italy so this reads like an extremely normal list of names to me.
This is a real question: are Italian names really that funny to native English speakers? More than other foreign names?
I don't think I would find a set of random British or French or German or Russian names inherently hilarious.
I think any lists of names that are so clearly a certain nationality tend to be funny to English speakers. If I saw a long list of obviously German, obviously French, or obviously Russian names, I wouldn't probably find that funny, too. Relatedly, when I went to the cemetery my grandparents are buried in, I found it amusing how obnoxiously Polish most of the names were (my grandparents were also of Polish descent).
Obviously British is a little trickier, because I feel like making a name obviously British to an English speaker involves making it kind of a joke to begin with.
To my ear that's the reason. America is such a mongrel nation it's difficult to assemble a dozen Americans and *not* have an Giovanni mixed with a Johann, John, and J'hon (or some creative neologism). We get used to sets of names that have polyglot origin, so a list that is so clearly monoglot feels like it's the name of a trapeze act or something, a set of show names.
The names are just fine. My mom was a Castellano before she married. I shopped at Parlanti’s grocery store went to school with Sabettis, Palazzaris, Vitos, Timpanos and Bertuccis all in a small Minnesota town. If the author wants to take it up with my uncle Sonny Castellano and his hulking brothers… well he probably shouldn’t do that. ;)
I'm a native English speaker, and I found it a bit odd to have Italian names mentioned as funny, especially in a review on a musical topic, when so much music vocabulary is Italian. Then again, I know of a minor English-speaking celebrity who takes care to pronounce words in any foreign language but German as correctly as possible, but finds it funny to mispronounce German for some reason.
As others pointed out, it was also odd for the review to sometimes use "castrato" and "castrato's" instead of the correct plural. Some writers have others edit their work before submission, either friends who'll volunteer, or hired help. That's something of a luxury, obviously, but could have benefited this review.
If he was going to make that comment at all it should have been sotto voce. :)
He settled for en passant, I guess.
I'm American, and I don't think those names are funny either.
I am an American with Italian ancestors and nothing about that list strikes me as funny or odd. Maybe the author is from Minnesota or Wisconsin. I would guess Italian names can strike some English speakers as funny because of the association with organized crime and/or New Jersey, both inherently kind of ridiculous.
The names didn't look odd to me, and I'm not Italian.
On the other hand, when I saw a woman's name which was a Hebrew first name and probably German/Ashkenazic last name, it took me a while to figure out why I thought she was overdoing it, then I realized I was used to the American custom of Ashkenazic Jews having more English first names.
I didn't think they were that funny, but there was a sort of tradition in British/American music of tenors who were not Italian taking on stereotypically Italian names for the sake of their career because the audience were so accustomed to "the best tenors are Italian".
So that may be behind that reaction; it sounds like someone trying to make singers sound the most 'Italian' they could sound.
Sounds plausible, and while explaining a joke can kill it, a hint if so would have been nice.
Unconvincing names for tenors, like Joeseppe Smithini or Gallo de Pulito (the "cleaning rooster" mascot of Chanteclair-brand cleaners), would be fairly funny.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFAA8PBAJps
Because I have a memory like a colander, the only example I can immediately think of is the American stage-magician who performed with a Chinese name (and in what would nowadays be called 'yellowface') inspired by a rivalry with a genuine Chinese magician:
Chung Ling Soo, born William Robinson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chung_Ling_Soo
Pretending to be Oriental (be that Arab, Indian, Chinese, etc.) for the purposes of stage acts arose out of the whole pop culture association of "the mysterious East" with magic and fakirs and so on.
To give a more charitable reading, there's also the issue that Europe's traditions simply don't go back as far as Asia's do (Greece is the oldest by far, and even there things are very attenuated by the LBAC; much of Europe wasn't civilised until Rome), and longer tradition = more mystique.
I read Gomorrah last week and send a short video of me reading a page to some friends because when read in succession it just becomes hilariously italian. 'Betalia diBrasa who was the cousin of Mario Bafruddo also worked for Tomballo diScione while serving under Tarsallo Bonpiera. When journalist Tasilla Luca di Porteza reported on the Murtalo family' it just becomes funny after a while.
I'm dutch, we also have funny names.
Italian surnames make good brand names because English speakers feel like they can pronounce them and spell them (even if they can't). Also, there are a lot of different Italian surnames so they are not all the same, but not so many that they run out of all the good ones.
I think it is funny to the reviewer because as Americans we often stop to wonder "That's an interesting name, I wonder what it's origins are?" due to the wide range of options you run into here. When you then read a book or whatever and every new (and perhaps unusual) name you come by cuts you off and screams "ITALIAN!" over, and over, past the point where you think even someone trying to be stereotypical wouldn't have gone that far, it is kind of funny. You start to feel like the author is almost joking or being silly, as if it were a fiction writer saying to himself "I don't know the audience is going to get this character is Italian... I'd better really make it clear through his name." and of course over doing it.
Or when you read a name and think "Wow, that is the most German/Italian/Russian/whatever name I have ever heard" only for the next three character's names to top it, every time, that makes you giggle a little.
I imagine particularly after reading a long horrific section on castration it doesn't take much to break the tension.
This is a good point, navigating American social life requires being able to figure out name origins.
I haven't found this to be true. If someone's ancestors' nationality is important to them, they'll tell you, even if it's obvious from the last name.
Definitely depends on where you live.
Strangers find my Italian last name funny. I'm third generation, and have a normal American first name.
I think it's a loving humor, Americans have a lot of affection for Italian culture.
I think Americans find one Italian name normal, but a full name weird. Italian-Americans have anglicized given names like Antonio → Anthony → Tony and Francesco → Francis → Frank. But that's true for any origin. The difference is that famous Italians are known in English by one name, such as Savonarola. Even contemporary figures like Fabio and Valentino.
This is so true. Even Italian Americans with names that lack English equivalents (Salvatore, Regina) tend to get cutsy American nicknames (Sal, Gina).
If anyone is curious, my wife is a classically trained singer, and the musicology passages only make a little sense to her. However, I took some linguistics classes in college (and I'm a largely self-trained), and they make a lot more sense to me. In particular, she doesn't know what a formant is, but I learned about that from linguistics.
The part that's slightly weird to me about this is the widespread adoration of the castrato voice. I don't particularly like it. Even among modern singers, I prefer the baritone and bass over the tenor among men, and the contralto and mezzo over soprano among women.
You haven't heard a good castrato voice. No modern person has. At most, you've heard countertenors. Granted, you probably wouldn't like it that much since you generally prefer lower pitches. I don't remember whether the article gives the range for castrati.
Well, I did listen to the Youtube video of Farinelli, which was made in his 40s, with crappy old equipment et cetera -- but I can nevertheless readily hear the similarities to, and differences from, a woman's voice.
But it doesn't matter. I'm just not enough into singing of that style and pitch so that, if I was offered a time machine, I would pay ordinary airfare to go back and hear it, in person, in the Sistine Chapel. I'm not super moved by a lot of soprano or tenor music, either, with some exceptions, e.g. even a philistine such as myself could not fail to appreciate Damrau's der Hölle Rache, Callas's Habanera, or Pavarotti's Nessun Dorma. Although...now I think of it, there's also Björling and Merrill Pearl Fishers duet...perhaps I should be less dogmatic.
Still, generally I prefer a lower register in both men and women. The whole "ethereal" angelic impression doesn't work for me at all. I prefer my song to be more telluric. Exempli gratia I prefer the duet Placido Domingo and John Denver made of "Perhaps Love" considerably more than I do Domingo's solo performance of the same song.
At least the Queen of the Night isn't angelic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFktfr1kmHc
More Queen of the Night. Studio recording, so she's putting it all into sounding good instead of also having to to look terrifying.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJJW0dE5GF0
"Well, I did listen to the Youtube video of Farinelli"
Farinelli died in the 1700's.
I think you mean Alessandro Moreschi:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLjvfqnD0ws
Yes, thank you, I appreciate the correction.
So Allegri's 'Miserere' is the opposite of your cup of tea 😁
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKj1iK2WKS8
I agree that nothing beats a good Russian bass. Or seemingly, even lower than a bass, an oktavist:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFvd_qiQ6Ro&list=RDCMUCg6IiNQqZWJH3ZFfJhXRMsg&index=23
Oh not at all. Four parts is something altogether different, I was refering to solos. In four part pieces I appreciate each of the voices (including the sopranos and tenors of course), they each contribute something essential.
Indeed, a great deal of the beauty of four part pieces (to me) is the cooperative nature of the music: men and women, voices from the most angelic to the most earthy, all working together, pulling the same musical plow. The sound of the soprano in that case working with the baritone and bass, for example, each a separate effort and yet yoked to the same objective, helping each other -- some kind of metaphor for marriage and civil society generally ha ha -- is marvelous. Harmony is fabulous! Like Lord Peter I appreciate it perhaps even more than a gifted solo performance.
And thanks for the link, again. You have excellent taste in pre-Classical music, if you put together a list of favorites somewhere I would definitely go listen to them all with gratitude.
Thank you for the kind words! I don't really have a list of recommendations, I do tend to go "I heard this, I liked it" at random all over the place rather than put together connected "if I liked X then I might like Y".
I will hear different versions of a piece, and be "I prefer A's version to B's version", but will I make a specific note of who A and B are? No, I will not, and then I will forget, and then I have to scrabble around on Youtube listening to different uploads to figure out "oh yeah it was *this* one" 😁
That being said, I tend to like the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra version of Pärt's works because they seem to 'get' him very reliably:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO74PaaR_Ug
Mostly, I meander around on Youtube: "Oh, I like what I heard from Jordi Savall, any more by him?" "What's a theorbo? Oh, *that's* a theorbo" "Hey, 'Tous Les Matins du Monde' was a fantastic movie, who's this Marin Marais guy?" etc.
There seems to have been this sweet spot of 80s/90s/00s historical-musical movies, generally but not always French, that was just right for my tastes. I haven't gotten to see the full version of this one yet, but I just found it on Youtube so that goes on the list!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHnHlXDS8rE&list=RDlps1vtQilXk&index=2
That being said, I find my tastes incline to early music, church music (chant, but polyphony too), 'world music' when it's nearer its folk roots, and up to around Mozart. The Romantic era is a bit too dramatic and colourful for me. Then some of the Moderns, I like Glass for instance (what I've heard of his, and I wasn't expecting to like it). I can't get on with the late Harrison Birtwistle, though I tried. Sugary pop-classical stuff like Rutter and Karl Jenkins puts me right off (I appreciate that Jenkins is very popular and very successful, and in the tradition of the mass of classical composers of the past who were very popular, very successful, and were writing the pop hits of their day - but are not now anything more than a footnote to the history of music). I don't think Jenkins is a 'classical music' composer, though that's probably nit-picking. Good luck to the guy, but it's the 'Il Divo'/other soft-classic pop hits style of music for the masses - and that's okay, but it's not 'highbrow art' (and, given that I also don't like much of 'highbrow art', I realise that is dreadful snobbery on my part).
Mostly I don't like auricular treacle, and that's what Jenkins et al. sound like to me.
EDIT: Oh yeah, horse-head fiddle rocks! Even when it's moved into folk-rock territory! 😁
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brwdWi-GszE
Thank you kindly. I will enjoy exploring these.
It is generally to do with taste; I find that I prefer the tenor voice to the soprano (because a lot of soprano voices get a bit squeaky or forced when they try to belt out an extended note), but then I like counter-tenor and treble voices as well as bass.
I think it is more that I prefer the Baroque style - clear, music over text - than the modern (well, for 19th century as modern) Romantic style - emotional, Italian-influenced, 'weepy' in a sense because it is all about acting and interpretation.
What about the King's Singers?
https://youtu.be/2KSxg9Ij5r8
Or after crossing the street to the pub, Maddy Prior?
https://youtu.be/CC5Ixae8ezo
She's a good singer. I do have certain reservations about English folk, since it sort of meandered off into being 60s type protest songs and less about the authentic traditions, but that's my own idiosyncracies talking.
I like the King's Singers in small doses. Rather like the SF men's choir, Chanticleer, they both have a tendency to the 'showbizzy' and musical theatre type performances, at least to my ear. Same with John Rutter's work - too poppy for my tastes.
For someone who can't sing a note, play an instrument, have no grounding in musicology, nor be able to reliably identify "doh" from "fah" when played on a piano and asked "what note was that?", I have terribly snobby tastes! 🤣
Well I agree with you, for what it's worth (since I also have no discernible musical talent).
I write to disagree with the comparison to football players. People really do seek out violent, competitive sports because they *like it*. I think it’s somewhat ridiculous to compare voluntary games to getting castrated at age 10 or so.
"This was a particularly common theme in Chinese history where eunuchs served emperors, and sometimes became emperors themselves (Liu Jin and Wei Zhongxian)"
Nitpick: These two men were very powerful, but did not hold the title of Emperor. The only eunuch with that honor was Cao Teng, who received it long after his death. (When Cao Pi declared himself Emperor, he also granted the title to three dead ancestors, including his adopted great-grandfather Cao Teng.)
By the way, just thinking, I don't think I would enjoy the book, for two reasons.
(1) I find the fact that eunuchs have been created in many societies to be far more interesting than any of the special-case aspects of castrati.
(2) When the reviewer says"Musicologist Phil Ford traces the origin of the modern day mutant archetype back to the castrati", he doesn't say anything to to explain how the author does this. All that appears in the review is a pretty detailed discussion of the castrati, but the introductory remark about the tracing of the "modern archetype" to the castrati seems like a throwaway to me.
Offhand, it seems far-fetched to trace a variegated sci-fi fictional meme back to this interesting real-life phenomenon. For one thing, the few modern examples he mentions that I am familiar with (like The Incredible Hulk) were unique (if I can remember back that far). The castrati were a group who played a role in the society and moreover were created by the society to play this role, and the role was a subservient role, not a heroic or dominant role. As far as I know, there was just one Incredible Hulk and he happened by accident. So I'm skeptical of the connection.
Having said that, I'm only familiar with his pre-1970 "modern archetypes". I've not heard of most of them, like X-men.
Yes, the X-Men analogy was strained and never developed. The broader version of "exposed to gamma radiation and now hulks out when angry" is more along the lines; a gain of exceptional abilities that also has a great cost (Banner is isolated from normal society due to his fears of the Hulk and the pursuit of the Hulk by General Ross) but again, that was mentioned then dropped.
The castrati (and the general case of eunuchs) on their own merits is interest enough without having to drag in "what metaphor for modern relevance can I use to hook the attention of the historically and culturally illiterate?" efforts. We're not *that* much of cultural philistines that we won't read a review unless it namechecks comics or the Marvel universe!
The second Avengers movie explicitly drew parallels between Hulk and Black Widow on the basis that Black Widow had been rendered incapable of reproducing in the process of making her a super-spy and elite assassin. I don't think the parallels worked very well, but it shows that someone in the writers' room thought that "radiation-fueled rage monster" was comparable to a person who was effectively castrated (or whatever the female equivalent is) for the sake of being preternaturally skilled in their area of expertise.
"Offhand, it seems far-fetched to trace a variegated sci-fi fictional meme back to this interesting real-life phenomenon."
Historians are very good at inventing elaborate connections between tropes and real-life things with the flimsiest of evidence.
Overall a nice and well written review, but I do wonder about the quote "perhaps the best (the only?) example of extended human-transhuman co-existence"
As far as I know, individuals with one foot in the Otherworld (or whatever you want to call it) were a staple of ancient societies. In the usual empires taught in school, the emperor was half human half god - but at least the Egyptians portrayed their gods as half-animals.
Then there is the role of shaman, medicine (wo)man, spirit healer and many other names that seems to exist across many different cultures, which as far as I know was definitely viewed as transhumane, and often as having one foot in the animal world (even if called the spirit world, it's generally populated by animal figures). Trance healer who transforms into an animal (at least metaphysically) is almost a trope I think?
Excellent review.
If I had to guess about humans being modified for environmentalist reasons in the future, it would be mental changes to be able to predict extremely complex changes in organisms and climate. Though maybe people (partly computerized) who could actually see microorganisms would be interesting.
I've played with the idea of people modified to handle higher temperatures, but the changes would probably need to be very cheap.
Emmm. I'd guess tolerance for sedentary occupations (coder, truck driver, forklift driver, pilot - especially if those jobs go remote) which might include cardio vascular and would probably include eyes & urinary modification.
I don't see any current predictions sufficient to require increased high temp modifications - it's not like we don't already have people living in Pheonix, Vegas, San Antonio, and Havana.
More likely, though, than deliberate changes for the environment would be deliberate changes for human interaction - like steroids for combating Dad bod, facelifts & botox, high heels & pushup bras. We are long past the point where the environment is the day to day opponent in our lives.
Well, if you want to look *well* into the future, in 200-500 million years the Sun will become too bright for life on Earth (as we know it), so some significant adaptation will be necessary. And looking even further, when the Sun expands to become a red giant, presumably the only habitable worlds left will be the outer icy moons, which will become much warmer, and possessed of liquid water, but which will at least initially have a strong reducing chemistry (and high radiation) inhospitable to us as we are now.
You're getting into _Last and First Men_ by Olaf Stapledon territory.
I've heard speculation about slowing down changes in the sun. I have no idea whether it's sound.
Without knowing the proposed mechanism, I couldn't say, but I'm doubtful. The evolution of the Sun happens for pretty basic reasons -- it runs out of H to fuse and isn't big enough to burn heavier elements.
One of the things that is interesting to me about what we have learned about the outer planets over the past 30 years is that they are potentially life-supporting locations that are currently in the deep freeze, so to speak. Many (Titan, Europa, Pluto) have water and light organic elements, so they would be just right for life as we know it -- if their temperature were raised 200K or so.
But that is what *will* happen, as the Sun gets brighter. At some point, Earth will be like Mercury, scorched into a barren cinder, while these outer planets will be warm and humid, just perfect for life. These later stages of the Sun's life will certainly last a long time, a good chunk of a billion years, perhaps. So it seems completely plausible that there will be a second act in life's appearance in this Solar System: after our world has turned to ashes, new life may arise on the outer planets and thrive for hundreds of millions of years.
It would make an interesting bit of fiction to write about creatures from 1,200 million years in the future on a lush living Pluto, say, speculating about whether life could ever have existed on the (now roasting barren rock) of the third planet, the way we wonder whether life could ever have existed on Mars a billion years ago. (And for that matter maybe it did: maybe *we* are the Second Act, and there is a Third Act to come.)
Pet peeve: Our _current_ launch capacity is enough to put enough micron-thick foil between the Earth and the Sun to keep up with solar brightening prior to the red giant stage.
An interesting assertion. Let's see, if I have this correct, then by similar triangles we have:
(R_sun - R_earth)/(R_orbit) = (R_shade - R_earth)/R_L1
Where R_sun = the radius of the Sun, R_earth = radius of the Earth, R_shade = radius of the sunshade, R_orbit = mean orbital radius of the Earth, and R_L1 equals the distance from Earth to L1 (about 1 million km), the only stable place you could put a sunshade.
That gives R_shade = 11,000 km. If we assume a thickness of 1 micron, that still gives us 380 million m^3 of sunshade material. If we assume it has the density of polyethylene (0.95 g/cm^3) that comes out to ~360 million metric tonnes to launch all the way to L1. That doesn't really feel like it's within current launch capability.
Many thanks for the calculation! Yes, roughly 360 million metric tons, added bit by bit over roughly 500 million years (roughly when the brightening would cook us), calls for roughly 0.72 tons per year, which is within our current launch capacity, to the best of my knowledge.
“But it’s better for us not to know the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so very good at one particular thing…the actual facts of the sacrifices repel us when we see them: basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up with bovine hormones until they collapse or explode. We prefer not to consider closely the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews or to consider what impoverishments in one’s mental life would allow people actually to think the way great athletes seem to think. Note the way ‘up close and personal’ profiles of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life–outside interests and activities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what’s obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It’s farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one area of excellence. An ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child’s world, is very small…[Tennis player Michael] Joyce is, in other words, a complete man, though in a grotesquely limited way…Already, for Joyce, at twenty-two, it’s too late for anything else; he’s invested too much, is in too deep. I think he’s both lucky and unlucky. He will say he is happy and mean it. Wish him well.”
David Foster Wallace, The String Theory
Well that’s a pile of BS - I can introduce you to elite athletes who are also engineers, musicians and all round lovely people. Sure it’s hard work training but if it’s really all-consuming you’re doing it wrong and probably at risk of burnout.
What is your definition of elite? I would say it is incredibly difficult (sure, its not impossible) to be a top 100-200 in any major sport and also be an accomplished engineer or musician.
Good question, but I'm going by my son and his friends who are GB olympic athletes, top 20 in the world in 400m etc
While there are those cases, there are counterpoint cases, and you can tell that there's more to the elite athlete based on what becomes of them afterwards. I don't know so much about elite athletes but I read a bunch of bios of elite figure skaters and ballet dancers, and at least some go on to college, families, separate careers. It's also probably true that some sports are more all-consuming than others. For example, I think it's easier to have a life outside of your sport and still achieve great heights if you train a martial art than, perhaps, elite soccer.
That's a bit over the top. I think it may be true for some segment of top athletes, for sure, but many of the very best are born with some kind of weird athletic gift and they don't actually have to become drudges to win. When I listen to Usain Bolt or Michael Phelps or even Shaq they seem like pretty together guys, albeit driven to excel and possessed of self-discipline at an astounding level. In general they also seem above-average in intelligence, which doesn't surprise me as the head game is quite important at the elite level.
This doesn't seem to hold up. Arnold Schwarzenegger seems like a highly intelligent and driven man. Michael Jordan was able to retire gracefully and continue expanding his wealth through smart investments. Michael Phelps seems like an all-around normal guy who just happens to be an Olympic gold medalist, with no severe deficiencies in any other areas of life. Even Alex Rodriguez, who suffered some serious leg injuries due to his baseball career, seems to have made a full recovery and appears to be doing quite well for himself in retirement.
The *only* sports where I see the phenomenon Wallace is describing with any regularity are football, boxing, and WWE-style "pro-wrestling" (which involves a lot more hits and slams than traditional wrestling). And I'd imagine that's because those particular sports often involve taking hard blows to the head on a regular basis, resulting in traumatic brain injuries. Pro-wrestler Chris Benoit, who killed his family and then himself in a fit of rage, had severe brain damage; autopsy revealed that his brain resembled that of "an 80 year old with Alzheimer's." OJ Simpson was given a mental competency test when he was on trial for murder and found to have an IQ of only 80, despite showing no signs of especially low intelligence earlier in life; since then, his mental condition only seems to have gotten worse. It's pretty clear that these problems are a result of direct physical trauma to the brain, rather than any broader tendency for athletes in general to neglect their social and intellectual development as Wallace is claiming.
For whatever reason, reading about the duel between Farinelli and Bernacci made me think of "The Devil Went Down To Georgia".
I was surprised not to see, in the speculations section, any mention of the vast (percentage, at least) increase of trans-sexual medical procedures in the past ten years, disproportionately among young women. Is that simply because you don’t see a connection to any power structures of the kinds that the book described?
From the New York Times a week ago:
‘I Would Love to Sing Lucia’: A Male Soprano Comes Into His Own
Samuel Mariño, a singer with a rare voice type in opera, is making his Decca album debut with a glimpse at a more gender-fluid future.
By J.S. Marcus
May 27, 2022
BERLIN — Samuel Mariño is a rarity in opera: a true male soprano.
Rather than relying on falsetto as a countertenor would, Mariño, 28, is able to comfortably sing high notes with his chest voice. Now he is branching out from Baroque parts originally written for castrati. A big step in that direction: “Sopranista,” his debut album on the Decca label, which is out on Friday.
He has his eye on a variety of roles, including Sophie, the ingénue of Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier,” and Dvorak’s Rusalka, he said in an interview, with the aim of sending a message that classical music should be “open to all communities,” including a multiplicity of genders. And “Sopranista,” named after the Italian term for a male soprano, offers a glimpse at that more fluid future.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/27/arts/music/samuel-marino-sopranista.html
I doubt he is an author much recommended here, but Kingsley Amis' book The Alteration is an interesting alternative history tale (likely inspired by Keith Roberts' Pavane) about castrati surviving to the present day in a world where there had been no Reformation.
<i>That Catholic doctrine also happened to forbid bodily mutilation was only a minor inconvenience; there was, fortunately, a loophole—it was allowed in cases of medical necessity. This led to all kinds of fabricated stories in which an accident damaged the genitalia and castration was deemed necessary in order to save the boy’s life. The stories usually centered around animals—falls from horses, attacks by wild boar, or, hilariously, bites on the junk by wild swans (“Swans, we should remember, where renowned in mythic and lyric traditions for singing while dying”)—and also frequently involved perilous male activities such as horseback riding or hunting in order to allow the castrato to save face and maintain something of a masculine reputation.</i>
That makes me curious -- have there been any attempts to estimate how many castrati were originally castrated for (what the doctors thought were) genuine medical reasons vs. how many cases were fabricated? All the modern sources I've come across seem to assume that all cases were fabrications, but I'm not sure the castrato would really "save face" by appealing to a story that everybody knew was made up.
This was a good review, and I felt like a I learnt some interesting things despite already being familiar with the Castrati and some of the details you bring up. It feels like you have a clear fascination with your subject matter along with a sense of humour in approaching it, and I found really endearing. The tie-in at the end to preoccupations familiar to readers of this blog was well done.
The only critical feedback I might give is that in the last section, your enthusiasm, combined with the bits in brackets, sort of conspired together to make the text seem less serious. Honestly I think the speculative part of the essay makes some good points, and I think you should give yourself a little bit more room to develop these ideas in full, without seeming breathless.
Well said, similar to my feelings as well :)
I see some people don't like the concluding thoughts - I enjoyed that it really wrapped back around to the mutant angle in a way that was very provocative.
Great review, loved it.
Thanks so much, your comment meant a lot :)
Hopefully transsexualism will bring about a renaissance of castrati <3
Review-of-the-review: 7/10
First of the finalists that I was actively disappointed with. The subject is interesting of course, but mostly just as a curiosity; the attempt to tie it to transhumanism at the end felt thin. The whole review did, actually. It was mostly a summary of the book's contents, engaging with the data and presentation only superficially. I wasn't a fan of the overly-casual voice, either. I know it's snooty of me, but when the reviewer wrote "my conscious is clear" I sniggered and thought "you're darn right it is".
All that being said, the review was concretely informative on many points. I especially appreciated how it wasn't trying to fit any narrative but just focused on faithfully bringing out the complexities and unexpected properties of the subject matter. It wasn't badly executed either, except by comparison with the very high standard of the other finalists.
As always, many thanks for contributing!
wooowww
:)
Honestly slay