On listening to absence

Where does the voice reside within the body? Rising mysteriously from within, it becomes a body in its own right—a sounding body—the moment it leaves. At once inseparable from the body and strangely autonomous, the voice moves through space and time, always pointing back to the singular body from which it emerged and whose traces it carries. In the case of the castrato, the body was altered in order to produce a singular voice—a voice whose extraordinary height eclipsed the violence through which it came into being. A strange preservation of a youthful voice that no longer seems to belong to the adult body: an intervention that separates voice from body while, at the same time, creating a voice that could belong to this body alone. In this text, composer and sound artist Leonie Strecker follows a voice that keeps returning to her: that of the last castrato, Alessandro Moreschi. It is the singular recording of a singular voice—one that bears witness to a broader cultural practice, yet belongs only to him. Strecker traces how the absent body that once made this voice possible unfolds within her own, how it acquires a renewed presence, and how it becomes part of her compositional practice.

Ever since I first heard Alessandro Moreschi’s recordings, I have returned to them repeatedly. Moreschi, often referred to as the last castrato, occupies a peculiar historical position: one of the last representatives of a disappearing vocal practice and the only castrato whose voice was ever recorded. What keeps drawing me back is not the historical significance of these recordings but the voice itself.

When I listen to the recording, what I find most striking is the timbral quality of the voice. Being partly obscured by the heavy artifacts of the recording technology of the time and by stylistic singing patterns that seem strangely old-fashioned today, the voice has a very bright, radiant, almost metallic character. It moves at ease in very high registers, where even on the upper edges it does not seem to lose strength. The voice breaks and trembles at points, yet the vocal gestures remain virtuosic and assured. The vocal range suggests a soprano, but its timbre is far away from a standard soprano sound. If there weren’t these cracks and trembles, fine vibratos and sudden vocal bends, the long-held notes could even suggest a mechanical sound production. Still, the voice sounds human, even if in an uncanny way. 

I fail to imagine the kind of body that would emit such a voice. From what I hear, I can only make assumptions about it. Its strangeness captivates me. An image is forming in my head. This image is transmitted purely through sound. It is blurry. It changes, it is never fully stable. I wonder if it ever could be stable, and if a sudden stability wouldn’t feel even more alienating. 

There once was somebody in a space, articulating this voice. There were other people in the space, too; in some of the recordings you can even hear them cheer and applaud. The applause reminds me that this voice was once part of a shared acoustic situation. The recording preserves fragments of that situation without allowing me to fully reconstruct it.

It must have felt strange to sing into the large apparatus that was the recording device of the time, an object that probably all of them were seeing for the first time. What did they think about the capturing of this moment in time? Did they think about the future, when and where this recording might be played again? Were they scared of the rigidity of the technology, being only able to capture one precise moment in time, with no possibility of repeating the performance? Maybe they were also just thinking about the present, enjoying the music in that very moment. This strangeness of novelty, of excitement, is somehow transmitted through the recording. It is through the voice that I am able to sense it.

When I listen to this recording now, no one and nothing that was present in the recording space is bodily present with me. I am listening to a trace, a document, to something that feels like a memory of someone else. Still, I can feel the presence of the body, of the space it is in. Of the people listening to this voice, and cheering it on. Through its crackles and hisses, the recording device also gains material presence. These humans, objects and spaces are bodily absent in my surroundings, yet listening continually brings them into presence. The recording mediates and transforms their presence, but still, it is there. This presence is never quite stable. It shifts as my attention shifts, allowing different bodies, spaces and technologies to emerge into focus. Multiple presences appear and disappear. 

Listening to these absent bodies, objects and spaces may become a speculative act. How do their presences emerge and interact with each other? How do I imagine their encounter? How do they connect to and interfere with my listening environment? 

These questions have gradually become compositional questions for me. Rather than trying to represent bodies or spaces, I have become interested in creating situations in which listeners continually renegotiate their assumptions about what they are hearing. If Moreschi’s recordings leave me searching for the body behind the voice, my own work often reverses that relationship: a visible body may carry another voice, several voices may seem to inhabit the same body, or recorded and live sounds may overlap until their boundaries become uncertain.