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.
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 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.
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."
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
The (“Music to soothe the Mad King”) link is broken.
IIRC the Chinese imperial eunuchs had their junk entirely cut off. A much more gruesome procedure with a much higher fatality 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.
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."
I'll take the responsibility on myself to point out that there is no University of Indiana. It's Indiana University.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Imagine becoming a castrati in China and being told the next day "actually we're gonna stop using you."
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.
Minor point, but it was distracting that "castrati" and "castrato" kept alternating singular and plural (and even "castrato's" once!)
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
“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
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.
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.
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