AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

Abstracts Friday afternoon 81
MARC’ANTONIO PASQUALINI, A CASTRATO DA CAMERA
Margaret Murata
University of California, Irvine
Each generation of opera critics has discussed the sexual equivocality of castrato singers, but
the earliest generation of famous castrati began their careers as church and chamber singers,
without the frissons of grotesqueness or transvestism we continue to associate with eighteenthcentury
celebrities in defined male and female operatic roles.* Among recent characterizations
of the early castrati, Roger Freitas has located them along a seventeenth-century continuum of
masculine-to-womanly behaviors applicable to all men, whereas Bonnie Gordon has focused
on the surgical intervention as an unsexing that led not to androgyny but to an android’s destiny,
a cultural role as a puppet.
Castrati no doubt first thought of themselves as child singers and then as musicians, with all
the possibilities of careers and social mobility that an educated dependent of the church could
imagine. A powerful patron could promote or sustain one’s career in both the choir loft and
palace chamber. A potential path to social status and stability In this regard could resemble
one for a young seminarian aiming to become a protonotary or a prelate. Castrati like Loreto
Vittori and Giovanni Andrea Bontempi became musici in the traditional sense—learned
musicians. Vittori’s appearances in court spectacles and opera were only part of his artistic
achievements, one component of his social image as a cavaliere. Freitas has drawn a similar
social portrait for the Tuscan soprano Atto Melani. A well-placed musician could almost lead
the life of a gentleman.
The stage performances of Roman soprano Marc’Antonio Pasqualini paralleled Vittori’s
(1628–45). Not at all inclined to literature however, Pasqualini, after his principal Barberini
patron left Rome in the years 1645–53, increasingly turned his hand to musical composition,
especially after his own retirement from the Cappella Sistina in 1659. Extant scores of Pasqualini’s
oeuvre as a composer of cantatas for the chamber and the oratorio far exceed in number
what survives by Vittori and Atto Melani. Nothing external compelled him to write music
(his life as a wealthy individual was resented as being above his station) and, unlike Vittori
and Bontempi, nothing from his hand was ever published. It appears that Pasqualini never
received compensation for any of it and never sang his own works in public. An examination
of several of the over two hundred works preserved from his own library in his own hand aims
to determine whether the castrato was only a musical pet or boy toy, a gentleman dilettante,
or a true musico, as revealed by his own voice.
PerforMing unDer susPicion: generic conventions
AnD AfricAn AMericAn feMAle singers
susan cook, university of Wisconsin-Madison, chair
In his influential work The Presentation of Self in everyday Life, sociologist Erving Goffman
theorizes human social behavior as a theatrical performance: a credibly staged scene leads an
audience to impute a self to a performed character. Extending Goffman’s theatrical metaphor
to musical performance, this panel examines the often oppositional duality of a performed self
and a performed character in the singing of four African-American women vocalists: Elizabeth
Taylor Greenfield, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, and Leontyne Price. The presentations
historicize an African American performance historiography by challenging the prevailing