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This chapter analyzes debates about the meaning and power of music and the constitution of English culture in the latter part of the century. These debates pitted ideas about the power of music against an anti-Orphic discourse that challenged what some writers saw as the hyperinflation of music's moral and social uses. The chapter centers on Burney's thwarted efforts to found a music conservatory and makes a detailed study of his opposition — in particular, John Bicknell's parody, Musical Travels thro' England, by Joel Collier, Organist (1774). In so doing, the chapter investigates the kind of cultural work performed by parody, burlesque, and other forms of symbolic inversion. It shows that rather than ushering in a new set of aesthetic values, anti-Orphic discourse used a triangulated argument in which figures like the castrato, the Polynesian, the traveler, and the music scholar were parodied. By burlesquing the outsider, composers and writers sidelined cosmopolitan, aristocratic musical culture in an effort to consolidate middle class forms of cultural production. This suggests that by the latter part of the century, Britons'fascination with foreignness was giving way to new anxieties as debates about music were folded into broader concerns about changing class relations, abolitionism, Jacobinism, and the loss of the American colonies.

The conception of power articulated, as discussed in this chapter, is interesting. The idea of the reach of the voice seems to emphasize its power to remain itself over distances that would ordinarily weaken or diffuse it. However, the reach of the voice is also associated with its ability to multiply itself into different forms. The ventriloquial voice is powerful both because it is able to retain its individuality and because it is able to lose it. Perhaps co-operating with this conception of the self-transformative voice is the idea of the voice of the castrato or falsetto voice, the idea, in other words, of a male voice whose power comes from its capacity to incorporate a female register; the castrato voice was never heard as ‘feminine’ or emasculated. The guides to ventriloquism which multiplied in the latter half of the 19th century similarly emphasize the qualities of strength and vigour required of the voice, along with the necessity of continuous care for the vocal organs.

Following Giovanni Battista Velluti’s London debut in 1825, British sheet-music publishers issued nearly thirty piano-vocal arrangements that claimed to bear traces of the castrato’s performance practice. Several arrangements advertised themselves as souvenirs of Velluti’s performances, drawing on a variety of textual and musical means to suggest that the printed page reflected what had occurred in real time. The bulk of the publications associated with Velluti did not purport to capture an actual performance, however, but instead featured extensive passages of alternative embellishments printed on separate ossia lines. As might be imagined, critics and consumers responded to such publications in distinct ways. The claims made by souvenir scores troubled critics, so much so that some went to great lengths to outline how the castrato’s performance departed from the composer’s original melody—or, indeed, from the souvenir score itself. For their part, amateur and aspiring professional singers envisioned souvenir scores and emended scores less as records of performance than as means of acquiring the castrato’s performance practice. Examining British critics’ and consumers’ reactions to these piano-vocal scores sheds new light on Velluti’s reception in late 1820s London and, more broadly, on the significance of singers’ creativity in the early to mid-nineteenth century.

The aim of this very short section is to justify the title of the book and show how Guadagni can be called a modern castrato and what characterised the new operatic age. It attempts to establish how Guadagni’s generation broke with the past (the ‘Farinelli generation’). It suggests how Guadagni came into contact with reform ideas and was precipitated into becoming an active player through the seminal title role in Gluck’s Orfeo. It argues that Guadagni understood the implications of the reform and capitalised on the way in which they suited his strengths and weaknesses.

Chapter 3 takes a radically material turn away from the historical questions of chapters 1 and 2 and to the musically embodied castrato voice, now vexingly lost. While acknowledging the acoustic problem, it shows that castrato voices can be better understood than heretofore. The chapter uses vocal production and emission to rethink the historical voice as sound, line, envelope, spectrum, frequency, and register. By amassing evidence from castrato scores, embellishments, pedagogical teachings, vocal exercises, anecdotes by fellow musicians, and heirs to castrato performance, and combining it with modern-day strobes, dissections, and MRIs, as well as acoustic analysis of the early recordings of the castrato Alessandro Moreschi and contemporaries, it shows that extraordinary castrato vocality accessed a high chest-dominant register with far-reaching musical consequences. The inferential evidence thus produced builds new methodological ramparts for musicology.

By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the castrato had become the overwhelming favorite to portray young, amorous men in the operatic stage. This chapter focuses on the observed effeminate characteristics of the castrati and examines how their evident effeminacy was linked to eroticism, arguing that castrati represented a theatrical imitation, characteristically exaggerated, of an erotically charged effeminate boy on the operatic stage.

The book describes voice change as a whole-body experience for adolescents, both female and male, which, while not always easy, should not scare music teachers away from working with adolescent singers. Many aspects of adolescent voice change are addressed throughout this book, but there may be exceptions to what is discussed. Everyone has an endocrine system that contains glands to produce hormones, but this system is sometimes influenced or disrupted by biological makeup, environmental conditions, or malnourishment; in addition, some people are diagnosed with atypical chromosomal structures. As a result, it is acknowledged that not every person on the planet does, in fact, experience a voice change. The focus of Thinking Outside the Voice Box remains on adolescent females and males who are engaged in the singing process and experiencing symptoms and expectations of a “typical” adolescent voice change.