The Granoff Music Center Colloquium at Tufts University presents University of Virginia assistant professor Bonnie Gordon in a virtual program titled “Garden Vibes: The Castrato as a Sonic Borderland.” This talk begins in the fantastic gardens of 16-century Italy and travels to the modern afterlife of the castrato. The talk positions the Italian castrato as a living sonic borderland; a figure who sang from the edges of imagined European cartography and who sounded the cusp of the Enlightened and the Unenlightened, human and machine, and human and animal. By putting the castrato in the context of premodern empire and conquest, Gordon gives a prehistory to accounts of the castrato that are more familiar to modern audiences.

This program will be presented on Zoom; the link is available on the Facebook event page.