Moreschi And The Voice Of The Castrato

Author : Nicholas Clapton
Publisher : Haus Pub.
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Castrati
ISBN : 1905791429

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Moreschi and the Voice of the Castrato by Nicholas Clapton Pdf

Known as the 'Angel of Rome,' Alessandro Moreschi was the last surviving castrato singer of the Vatican choir, and the only castrati whose voice was recorded. Its ethereal, haunting quality was highly prized for centuries in the papal basilicas and opera houses of Europe (readers can request a copy on CD using details in the book). The castrati tradition was established in Italy in the sixteenth century by Pope Clement VIII, and by the seventeenth century had moved onto the secular operatic stage, where castrato singers were feted as the 'pop stars' of their day. No other singers came close to matching their fame and notoriety. By the nineteenth century, however, their very existence had become an embarrassment, and when Moreschi himself joined the Sistine Chapel in 1883, there were only six castrati left inthe choir, and by 1903 they were officially no more. The strange and lonely life of Alessandro Moreschi was lived in the shadows of great events and great institutions, his personality glimpsed only by inference and allusion. Written by the acclaimed musicologist and countertenor Nicholas Clapton, this is a perceptive and informed study of the last survivor of a perennially intriguing part of Western cultural history. Clapton addresses the complexities inherent in such a complicated and historically neglected subject, establishing that castratisingers were an integral part of the lineage of Western music that should not be judged or condemned from the perspective of the twenty-first century. A professor of singing at the Royal Academy of Music,Nicholas Clapton's career as a counter-tenor has seen him particularly involved in performing the repertoire of the great castrati. In 2006, he produced and presented a television documentary on the castrato voice for the BBC.

Author : Nicholas Clapton
Publisher : Haus Publishing
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2004
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : UOM:39015057511084

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Moreschi by Nicholas Clapton Pdf

Behind the extraordinary sound of the voice of ‘the last castrato’ lies a strange and lonely life lived in the shadow of great events and institutions, a personality glimpsed by inference and allusion.

Author : Helen Berry
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 327 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2011-09-22
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780191620188

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The Castrato and His Wife by Helen Berry Pdf

The opera singer Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci was one of the most famous celebrities of the eighteenth century. In collaboration with the English composer Thomas Arne, he popularized Italian opera, translating it for English audiences and making it accessible with his own compositions which he performed in London's pleasure gardens. Mozart and J. C. Bach both composed for him. He was a rock star of his day, with a massive female following. He was also a castrato. Women flocked to his concerts and found him irresistible. His singing pupil, Dorothea Maunsell, a teenage girl from a genteel Irish family, eloped with him. There was a huge scandal; her father persecuted them mercilessly. Tenducci's wife joined him at his concerts, achieving a status as a performer she could never have dreamed of as a respectable girl. She also wrote a sensational account of their love affair, an early example of a teenage novel. Embroiled in debt, the Tenduccis fled to Italy, and the marriage collapsed when she fell in love with another man. There followed a highly publicized and unique marriage annulment case in the London courts. Everything hinged on the status of the marriage; whether the husband was capable of consummation, and what exactly had happened to him as a small boy in a remote Italian hill village decades before. Ranging from the salons of princes and the grand opera houses of Europe to the remote hill towns of Tuscany, the unconventional love story of the castrato and his wife affords a fascinating insight into the world of opera and the history of sex and marriage in Georgian Britain, while also exploring questions about the meaning of marriage that continue to resonate in our own time.

Author : Martha Feldman
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 496 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2016-08-02
Category : Music
ISBN : 9780520292444

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The Castrato by Martha Feldman Pdf

The Castrato is a nuanced exploration of why innumerable boys were castrated for singing between the mid-sixteenth and late-nineteenth centuries. It shows that the entire foundation of Western classical singing, culminating in bel canto, was birthed from an unlikely and historically unique set of desires, public and private, aesthetic, economic, and political. In Italy, castration for singing was understood through the lens of Catholic blood sacrifice as expressed in idioms of offering and renunciation and, paradoxically, in satire, verbal abuse, and even the symbolism of the castrato’s comic cousin Pulcinella. Sacrifice in turn was inseparable from the system of patriarchy—involving teachers, patrons, colleagues, and relatives—whereby castrated males were produced not as nonmen, as often thought nowadays, but as idealized males. Yet what captivated audiences and composers—from Cavalli and Pergolesi to Handel, Mozart, and Rossini—were the extraordinary capacities of castrato voices, a phenomenon ultimately unsettled by Enlightenment morality. Although the castrati failed to survive, their musicality and vocality have persisted long past their literal demise.

Author : Nicholas Clapton
Publisher : Haus Publishing
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2017-03-15
Category : Travel
ISBN : 9781909961401

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Budapest by Nicholas Clapton Pdf

Singer Nicholas Clapton first visited Budapest to record a recently discovered mass by an almost unknown eighteenth-century Hungarian composer. There, he discovered a striking sense of otherness in spite of Hungary’s central geographical and cultural position within Europe. And with that, a deep passion for the city was born. Budapest offers an engaging and affectionate look at this beautiful capital from the perspective of a musician who lived and worked there for many years. With rich musical traditions, both classical and folk, and possessing a language like almost no other, Hungary is in the process of abandoning the trappings of its communist past while attempting to preserve its culture from creeping globalization. Clapton delights in the fact that certain old-fashioned attitudes of courtesy, at times stemming from the very structures of the Magyar tongue, are still deeply ingrained in Hungarian society. At the same time, despite its association with world-famous composers such as Bartók, Liszt, and Kodály, music is far from an activity enjoyed only by the elite. Including plenty of tips on food, drink, and sites of interest, Budapest describes the capital in uniquely melodic terms and will delight lovers of travel and music alike.

Author : Kingsley Amis
Publisher : Random House
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2011-09-30
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9781446414699

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The Alteration by Kingsley Amis Pdf

Hubert Anvil is a 10 year old boy blessed with the voice of an angel. The Church hierarchy decrees that Hubert should be turned into a castrato - an alteration that could bring Hubert fame and fortune, but would also cut him off from an adult world he is curious to discover. In a dystopian world where Martin Luther never reformed and where the Holy Office's power is absolute, where will Hubert turn if he decides to defy their wishes?

Author : Fred Everett Maus,Sheila Whiteley
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 691 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2022-01-28
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780197607527

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The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness by Fred Everett Maus,Sheila Whiteley Pdf

Music and queerness interact in many different ways. The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness brings together many topics and scholarly disciplines, reflecting the diversity of current research and methodology. Each of the book's six sections exemplifies a particular rhetoric of queer music studies. The section "Kinds of Music" explores queer interactions with specific musics such as EDM, hip hop, and country. "Versions" explores queer meanings that emerge in the creation of a version of a pre-existing text, for instance in musical settings of Biblical texts or practices of karaoke. "Voices and Sounds" turns in various ways to the materiality of music and sound. "Lives" focuses on interactions of people's lives with music and queerness. "Histories" addresses moments in the past, beginning with times when present conceptualizations of sexuality had not yet developed and moving to cases studies of more recent history, including the creation of pop songs in response to HIV/AIDS and the Eurovision song contest. The final section, "Cross-cultural Queerness," asks how to understand gender and sexuality in locations where recent Euro-American concepts may not be appropriate.

Author : Anne Rice
Publisher : Ballantine Books
Page : 578 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 1995-04-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780345396938

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Cry to Heaven by Anne Rice Pdf

In a sweeping saga of music and vengeance, the acclaimed author of The Vampire Chronicles draws readers into eighteenth-century Italy, bringing to life the decadence beneath the shimmering surface of Venice, the wild frivolity of Naples, and the magnetic terror of its shadow, Vesuvius. This is the story of the castrati, the exquisite and otherworldly sopranos whose graceful bodies and glorious voices win the adulation of royal courts and grand opera houses throughout Europe. These men are revered as idols—and, at the same time, scorned for all they are not. Praise for Anne Rice and Cry to Heaven “Daring and imaginative . . . [Anne] Rice seems like nothing less than a magician: It is a pure and uncanny talent that can give a voice to monsters and angels both.”—The New York Times Book Review “To read Anne Rice is to become giddy as if spinnning through the mind of time.”—San Francisco Chronicle “If you surrender and go with her . . . you have surrendered to enchantment, as in a voluptuous dream.”—The Boston Globe “Rice is eerily good at making the impossible seem self-evident.”—Time

Author : Graham O'Reilly
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer
Page : 378 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2020
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781783274871

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'Allegri's Miserere' in the Sistine Chapel by Graham O'Reilly Pdf

The Miserere by Italian composer Gregorio Allegri (1582-1652) is one of the most popular, oft performed and recorded choral pieces of late Renaissance/early Baroque music. Yet the piece known today bears little resemblanceto Allegri's original or to the piece as it was performed before 1870.

Author : Angus Heriot
Publisher : Da Capo Press, Incorporated
Page : 274 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 1974-09-21
Category : Music
ISBN : UOM:39015009653992

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The Castrati In Opera by Angus Heriot Pdf

Author : Simon Ravens
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer Ltd
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2014
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781843839620

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The Supernatural Voice by Simon Ravens Pdf

The use of high male voices in the past has long been one of the most seriously misunderstood areas of musical scholarship and practice. In opening up this rich subject (to readers of all sorts) with refreshingly clear perspectives and plenty of new material, Simon Ravens' well-researched book goes a very long way to rectifying matters. Ravens writes damnably well, and if the story that emerges is necessarily a complex one, his treatment of it is always engagingly comprehensible.' ANDREW PARROTT Tracing the origins, influences and development of falsetto singing in Western music, Simon Ravens offers a revisionist history of high male singing from the Ancient Greeks to Michael Jackson. This history embraces not just singers of counter-tenor and alto parts up to and including our own time but the castrati of the Ancient world, the male sopranists of late Medieval and Renaissance Europe, and the dual-register tenors of the Baroque and Classical periods. Musical aesthetics aside, to understand the changing ways men have sung high, it is also vital to address extra-musical factors - which are themselves in a state of flux. To this end, Ravens illuminates his chronological survey by exploring topics as diverse as human physiology, the stereotyping of national characters, gender identity, and the changing of boys' voices. The result is a complex and fascinating history sure to appeal not only to music scholars but to performers and all those with an interest particularly in early music. Simon Ravens is a performer, writer, and director of Musica Contexta, with whom he has performed in Britain and Europe, regularly broadcast, and made numerous acclaimed recordings. Ravens had previously founded and directed Australasia's foremost early music choir, the Tudor Consort. Between 2002 and 2007 his regular monthly column Ravens View appeared in the Early Music Review, to which he still regularly contributes.

Author : Carlo Zuccarini
Publisher : Vernon Press
Page : 308 pages
File Size : 53,9 Mb
Release : 2019-03-30
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9781622736171

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Enjoying the Operatic Voice: A Neuropsychoanalytic Exploration of the Operatic Reception Experience by Carlo Zuccarini Pdf

There has been a long-standing and mutually-informing association between psychoanalysis, literature and the arts. Surprisingly, given the oral/aural basis of the ‘talking cure’, music has largely been overlooked by psychoanalysis. Notably, neuroscientific research investigating music reception and production has been steadily increasing in range and scope over the years. However, in order to avoid confounding factors, empirical studies have focused primarily on non-vocal music. Remarkably, operatic vocal music has not featured prominently in either field. Yet the multi-dimensional, multi-layered nature of opera, which fuses together a number of different arts, would appear to provide fertile soil for both disciplines. This book aims to fill that gap, providing a stepping stone for further research. It leverages the individual strengths of psychoanalysis and neuroscience both separately and jointly as the inter-discipline of neuropsychoanalysis. By combining various theories of mind with knowledge about music processing in the brain, this book comprehensively examines the operatic reception experience, providing an account in subjective as well as objective terms. It explores the bittersweet enjoyment of operatic vocal music, which can literally move an operaphile to tears. The explanation for this may be found in a number of subjective dynamics that are unique to the reception of opera, rather than in any distinct objective neural processes, which are common to the reception of all music. These subjective dynamics, which are recruited during neural processing, are triggered by the equally unique features of the operatic voice, in combination with a number of auxiliary elements that are specific to opera. This book will be of interest to academics in a broad range of science and arts disciplines related to music perception and performance, such as music psychology and operatic performance. It may also appeal to passionate operaphiles who wish to understand what drives their addiction!

Author : Patrick Barbier
Publisher : Souvenir Press
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 1998
Category : Castrati
ISBN : 0285634607

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The World of the Castrati by Patrick Barbier Pdf

This entertaining, authoritative book is the first study of the phenomenon of the castrati in relation to the baroque period, covering the lives and triumphs of more than 60 singers over three centuries, when the fashion for castrati was at its peak.

Author : David Drake
Publisher : Haus Publishing
Page : 398 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2005
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1904341853

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Sartre by David Drake Pdf

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) dominated the cultural and literary life of post-war France. He believed from an early age that he had a mission to be a writer and proceeded to realize this as a novelist, philosopher, screenwriter, playwright, literary and art critic, biographer, essayist, polemicist and journalist. Although before the Second World War, Sartre showed little inclination to become involved in politics, from 1945 he established himself as the very personification of intellectual commitment, taking public positions on national and international political issues from the Liberation until very shortly before his death. In this new biography, David Drake considers the works of Franceâs most famous twentieth-century intellectual, his relations with his contemporaries, and the political causes he espoused, all of which the author firmly locates in the turbulent times through which Sartre lived.

Author : Sasha Geffen
Publisher : University of Texas Press
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2020-04-07
Category : Music
ISBN : 9781477318782

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Glitter Up the Dark by Sasha Geffen Pdf

Why has music so often served as an accomplice to transcendent expressions of gender? Why did the query "is he musical?" become code, in the twentieth century, for "is he gay?" Why is music so inherently queer? For Sasha Geffen, the answers lie, in part, in music’s intrinsic quality of subliminal expression, which, through paradox and contradiction, allows rigid gender roles to fall away in a sensual and ambiguous exchange between performer and listener. Glitter Up the Dark traces the history of this gender fluidity in pop music from the early twentieth century to the present day. Starting with early blues and the Beatles and continuing with performers such as David Bowie, Prince, Missy Elliot, and Frank Ocean, Geffen explores how artists have used music, fashion, language, and technology to break out of the confines mandated by gender essentialism and establish the voice as the primary expression of gender transgression. From glam rock and punk to disco, techno, and hip-hop, music helped set the stage for today’s conversations about trans rights and recognition of nonbinary and third-gender identities. Glitter Up the Dark takes a long look back at the path that led here.