Maria Callas’s Lyric and Coloratura Arias. Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.
More than 40 years after her death, the legend of Maria Callas, “La Divina Assoluta,” remains unsurpassed. Her sensational opera career and fraught private life, from her definitive mastery of iconic opera roles to her love affairs and tantrums, made her the prototype for the 20th century celebrity diva. Her extraordinary voice, in particular, has become an object of cult-like adoration and cultural significance almost with a life of its own. Such adoration is not without consequences. When Callas is transformed into a vessel for such transcendent magic, it overshadows what is perhaps her most superhuman ability—the masterful technique she deployed to shape and craft her astounding instrument.
Using one of Callas’s first recital recordings from 1954, this book envisions each aria as a lens to examine various aspects of vocalization and cultural reception of the feminized voice in both classical and pop culture, from Homer’s Sirens to Star Trek. With references to works by Marina Abramović, Charles Baudelaire, Michel Chion, Wayne Koestenbaum, Greil Marcus, and Farah Jasmine Griffin, as well as films by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jonathan Demme, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, each chapter explores phenomena unique to the singing voice, including the operatic screaming point, the politics of listening, and the singing simulacrum.
"Even if you've never heard of the 1954 Maria Callas album,
even if you neither know or care about her or opera, this book is entrancing."
- Greil Marcus, Real Life Top Ten, Los Angeles Review of Books 1/2022
“Both accessible and rigorous” this book is “a meditation on Callas in the vein of Alex Ross’s best public scholarship,
merged with the personal analytical style of authors like Catherine Clement and Philip Gossett.” IAWM, P. Alderman Award Committee 2022
“From Earth Angels to Electric Lucifer: Castrati, Doo Wop and the Vocoder.” Conference Proceedings IASPM Int. 2017. Serie Syst.Musikwissenschaft. Heidelberg: Springer, 2017
Abstract:
The transformed, angelic voice is in a precarious position—between corpus and void, heaven and earth. As “sacred monsters” of the Baroque, the Castrati had voices described as otherworldly and “strangely disembodied.” An amalgam of male, female and childlike qualities, it is angelic in its liminality, a kind of tonal apotheosis. The 1950s, a time preoccupied with heaven, from winged cars to airwave Earth Angels, saw a curious renaissance of this Baroque ideal. With doo-wop, the seemingly sexless voice of the singer shares the trait of sounding angelic with the mythic androgyny of the Castrati—both blur gender lines through vocal manipulation. Technology allows the transformed voice to lose all traces of the body. Bruce Haack's psychedelic song cycle The Electric Lucifer, “a battle between heaven and hell,” employs a voice put through a prototype vocoder to represent both angel and devil. Here, the voice is free to achieve multiple unearthly identities. This essay will examine the imbrication of heavenly narrative and transformed voice in popular music, focusing on how this disjunct between voice and body can be understood as a prism through which to explore shifting socio-political anxieties and desires.
“Spinning Steel into Gold” Oxford American, Issue 84, Spring 2014.
Abstract:
With its sonorous twang and sinuous chord changes, in music from Hank Williams to the Grateful Dead to Brian Eno, the sound of the pedal steel guitar is a uniquely American sonic signifier in popular music. This unique instrument synthesized in the mid-twentieth century, coalescing from a turn-of-the-century fascination with Polynesian culture fostered by a thriving lap steel franchise system and expanding radio networks. The sound of the pedal steel has become ubiquitous–however, to this day, there is no standard instrument or pedagogical method, which limits the development of a new community of players. In turn, new technologies that can accurately reproduce the pedal steel sound forego human performers altogether, threatening the survival of a small community of dedicated experts.This article explores the history and uncertain future of the pedal steel guitar by tracing the author’s journey from Los Angeles to Nashville, from pedal steel steel guitar novice to player.
Additional Criticism and Public Scholarship
