This first column by graphic designer Paul Elliman is about the voice, in a comparison between a world-famous rapper and an at least equally famous castrato.
What do Farinelli, superstar of the eighteenth-century Italian opera, and twenty-first-century gangsta rapper 50 Cent have in common? Sure, both, in their own times, are celebrity vocalists. But I am referring more to the idiosyncratic nature of their vocal faculties. As a youth, Farinelli (born in 1705 and known then as Carlo Broschi) had his body painfully amended in order to achieve the incredible vocal range of the castrato. Ouch!
Three centuries later, a twenty-five-year-old 50 Cent, (then known as Curtis Jackson) was shot nine times while sitting in a car outside his grandmother's house in Queens, New York. Later he described how a bullet through his jaw created the opening in his teeth that gives his voice its distinct whistling texture. Ouch and double ouch!
Earlier this year, Farinelli’s remains were exhumed from a cemetery in Bologna. A team of scientists and acoustic experts at Bologna University are now studying what is left of the singer’s larynx and vocal chords in the hopes of getting a better idea about how the mysterious voice of a castrato was achieved. The only recorded voice of an actual castrato is that of Alessandro Moreschi. Accompanied by the Sistine Chapel Choir, Moreschi’s first recordings were made in Rome in 1902 for the Gramophone and Typewriter Company. One of the supervisors, Fred Gaisburg, described the historic session in the Vatican: ‘Selecting a great salon with walls covered with Titians, Raphaels and Tintorettos, we mounted our grimy machine right in the middle of the floor.’
1902 was also the year that Enrico Caruso made his first recordings, likewise for the Gramophone and Typewriter Company. Five years later, in 1907, Caruso’s recording of Vesti la giubba (from Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci) became the world’s first gramophone record to sell a million copies, establishing a whole new paradigm for the voice and its presence in the modern world.
Once recorded, or even simply amplified, the voice now becomes the reified product of technology. And from around the middle of the twentieth century, we begin to take for granted the enhancing of the voice by this new tradition of technical manipulation.
From double-tracking (firmly established in the 1960s by the Beatles as a standard of the recording industry) to the ubiquitous use of Auto-Tune in contemporary pop music (as a simple means of correcting flat or sharp notes), something as apparently human as the voice has been transformed into a technical detail: a tradition that may have begun with painful mechanical adjustments to the human body.
But what is it, then, that Farinelli and his hip-hopera counterpart 50 Cent do not have in common – apart, perhaps, from Farinelli never quite managing to have a range of leisurewear in his name? While 50 Cent sails the airwaves to the top of the charts all over the world, castrati (with one exception, who was by then too old to really give a full account of his vocal powers) have never been recorded because the custom was stopped before the technology became available.
The Farinelli that we can listen to on record comes from the soundtrack to a Belgian bio-pic of his life directed by Gérard Corbiau in 1994. The famous voice was recreated by a computer synthesis of two present-day singers, the female Polish soprano, Ewa Malas-Godlewska, and the American countertenor, Derek Lee Ragin. In other words, while 50 Cent, despite selling millions of records and having at least nine lives, still holds onto the fleshy physicality of his mortal coil, Farinelli, the virtual castrato, has already moved on to the next level – a post-human voice that exists in a kind of spectrally disembodied vocal utopia.
Meanwhile, back in the violent world of the body, pop music continues to articulate the human negotiation of emotion and robotics. Still painful however perfectly pitched.
Now if I give you all of me
What you gon’ give me back?
Your body is callin’ me
(Mary J. Blige aan 50 Cent, All of Me)
Opinion
