Spectrevision Radio

Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.

For more episodes or to support the podcast, go to weirdst. This is J.F. Martel. Today, for the first time, Phil and I tackle a straight-up

academic monograph, an incredible, indeed poetic feat of historical detective work entitled

The Castrato, Reflections on Nature's and Kinds by Martha Feldman. Fellman's a cultural historian

specializes in development of modern music. In this book,

she tries to resurrect a class of artistic figures from the not-so-distant past, the famous

castrati, those Italian singers who owed their unearthly voices to the fact that they've been

castrated for that specific purpose before reaching puberty. Now, you won't be surprised to learn that it was

Phil, himself a distinguished cultural historian, who suggested that we discussed this unlikely

entry in the annals of the weird. At first, I wasn't sure why. I'd heard, of course, of the singing

eunuchs of the early modern era. My assumption was that the Castradi were essentially men who could sing like women.

But as I read Feldman's book, and as we will see on today's show, the truth is that the

castrato's voice is neither masculine nor feminine. It exists betwixt in between, a third kind,

a singularity. And thanks to that voice, the Castrotti have occupied an interesting

liminal zone in the early modern imagination, a zone straddling the old and the new,

the human and the animal, the angelic and the monstrous. As it turns out, these relics of

Western music history could easily serve as emissaries of the modern weird.

Emissaries second only, of course, to those intrepid denizens of modernity who've chosen

to support the Weird Studies podcast on Patreon. How's that for a segue? Dear listener, you too could

ascend to the ranks of these chosen few, unless, of course, you're already there,

in which case we thank you for your support. Neither Phil nor I is much of a singer, but know that

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