"People joke all the time about castrati this or that," says Pat Grossi, "but I promise you all is intact." Given the ethereal, even otherworldly nature of Grossi’s music—he’s the soprano-range singer, harp player, and producer behind Active Child—you could be forgiven for finding even the most discreet of dick jokes unexpected coming from him.
Grossi’s forthcoming LP, Mercy, is a maudlin and sentimental record full of longing and loss, aided by rich analog-sounding synth, plucked harp, and ambient samples. At the center of it all, there’s Grossi voice: a delicate-yet-powerful soaring falsetto.
The male falsetto has fascinated, teased and confounded listeners as a strange—and for too long, historically, cruel—curiosity that predates recorded music and even sheet music. Grossi references the plural of castrato—the Italian/Latin for castration, historically of pre-pubescent choir boys—often found within strongholds of the Roman Empire and post-Empire culture in Italy and the Vatican. The horrid ritual took place with regularity from the fifth to the 18th centuries. The boys were victimized to maintain their voices’ higher pitch for religious music, the barbaric custom spreading to secular music—namely Italian opera—in the 17th and 18th centuries. In a grotesque historical fame, this created opera’s first stars, whose vocal prowess with falsetto was met with critical praise and frantic adoring audiences. Thankfully, the practice largely died out by the 19th century and was banned formally in Italy by 1870.
Today, opera stars have become pop stars, many of whom perform in a similar male falsetto, echoing strains of the castrato; Pharrell, Justin Timberlake, D'Angelo, Miguel, and the like carry on the archetype in pop and R&B. Outside the Top 40, singer Milosh of Rhye stirred up preconceptions recently of what denotes/connotes a female voice with 2013’s Woman.
In electronic music, Active Child’s Grossi sings some of the genre’s most uniformly high-pitched vocals. On his 2011 debut LP You Are All I See, he collaborated with kindred vocal spirit Tom Krell, better known as How to Dress Well, on "Playing House". They share a filtered/fractured R&B-via-electronica sound with UK bass sensation James Blake, who turns in a killer falsetto on "Retrograde", featuring possibly his best-known vocal hook to date.
So what the hell works listeners up so much—for literal centuries—about the male falsetto? In pop, R&B and rock (Bono, Chris Martin, Geddy Lee, Axl Rose) it evokes sex, charisma, and/or vocal prowess; alternately, it can evoke emotional tenderness and pathos. Grossi, Krell and Blake evoke—if not castrati—boyish innocence. The unholy falsetto screech of Of Montreal's Kevin Barnes intentionally evokes a freakish quality. All of the above applies—and, let’s be real, is largely derived from—Prince himself. And if you let Susan Rogers—a behavioral neuroscience, music cognition expert and professor at the Berklee College of Music—you’d be a fool to talk about male falsetto without mentioning him.
Rogers worked as a sound engineer on Purple Rain and Sign o' the Times. On a recent episode of NPR Music’s All Songs Considered, she offered a scientific explanation for falsetto’s appeal. One that—perhaps unintentionally—reinforces gender stereotypes via sexual biology.
"Our voices signify sexual fitness," Rogers said. "Humans are one of only four species on planet Earth where the male’s voice is an octave lower than the female’s… Human males have this Adam’s Apple and the voice is an octave lower than the female. Our voices are different. So women evolved to have a voice that’s really soothing because that says we [can] put babies to sleep and we’d be good mothers… Men evolved with this chest voice to say ‘I’ve got lung power, I’ve got power to spare.’ So when a man can go from that chest voice to the head voice, he’s saying, ‘I am all that. I’ve got the power in my lungs.’"
Vocal range and power is impressive and—when based in evolutionary biology—the soothing-female/strong-male dichotomy is a not-illogical way to explain the male falsetto’s base appeal. It could explain why fans clamored for opera virtuosos then and certain pop stars now. But it views the phenomenon as reinforcement, not transcendence, of existing gender archetypes. Yet the spectacular and often virtuosic male falsetto is undeniably the latter! It’s transcendent, beautiful and, at times, shocking to the Reptilian brain. Rogers’ stated view seems contrary to this self-evident truth, not to mention it seems awfully traditional.
"For me, there’s something intrinsically appealing about a reversal of [vocal] roles," Grossi says. "I think that blurring of genders is exciting and very powerful."
Grossi hints at a more gender-neutral—or perhaps gender-obscure—way to look at the male falsetto: a tiny defiance toward societal gender roles and, just maybe, biological destiny. The falsetto of pseudomonic male vocalists like Prince or Active Child—like so many others’ before, going back centuries—suggests with pitch, timbre, and emotion that men, at least as performers, can be openly fragile and tender, just as women are expected to be traditionally. It’s as good a theory as any as to why it so lathers up listeners; it never stops challenging something primal in us as listeners.
"My assumption is it's only attractive when paired with a chest voice," Rogers says in a follow-up interview about her theory on male falsetto. Ever the scientist, she says she’d like to test that theory in a proper experiment, with a control group and an experimental one. "But it might be signaling a feminine side in the male. That is also attractive. The voice could be signalling, ‘I'm not as aggressive as other men.’"
She would know regarding Prince, in particular. His falsetto voice, she says, was always ready to go. No need for warm ups.
"He liked to [record] his vocals completely alone. He wanted to work in absolute private. He didn't want anyone to hear it until it was done."
Perhaps not coincidentally, Grossi records vocals the same way for his Active Child recordings.
"For some reason, I like to feel like no one is listening," he says. "It’s much more difficult when a producer or group of people are standing on the other side of a window with talkback."
Grossi started singing at the tender age of nine in the exact opposite of solitude: with the renowned Philadelphia Boys Choir.
"Soprano One was my placement when I joined," he says. "At the time, I was up there. I mean, way up. And although I can't hit those notes anymore, I still sing within standard soprano range and even above… I never thought twice about it until I met some more experienced professional singers who noted that my countertenor [voice] was a rarity. I have noticed, though, that as I get older my range is slowly narrowing. Maybe one day I'll sing like Scott Walker."
Maybe. Who can say? After all, voices, over time—much like gender norms—can change.