Controlled Screaming in music is not a new vocal technique. Singers and scholars alike have been referring to the operatic style of vocal production with variants of this description for many years. In the modern era, we have a much different understanding of this vocalism stemming from the screaming and falsetto heard in Heavy Metal. One performer who can be identified as a paragon of this technique is King Diamond, the now famous solo artist who began his illustrious performance career singing with the Heavy Metal band, Mercyful Fate. King Diamond has become an iconic force in the Heavy Metal scene due largely to his ability to sing with controlled screaming or falsetto. With an expansive vocal range of four octaves, it would be expected that the higher end of his tessitura would color his voice as effeminate. However, the high vocal technique employed by King Diamond coalesces with the raw and exaggerated sense of masculinity he presents performatively and aesthetically, through his use of demonic imagery and corpse paint. Paralleling this heavily affected vocal technique, we look back at the tradition of Castrati operatic singers beginning in the early eighteenth century. This tradition sustained the high vocal range of vocally talented young men into adulthood by means of castration before their voices had a chance to break. Castrati were well known for their overexaggerated presentation of masculinity, despite the high tessitura of their vocal range, in both the characterization of their roles and the way they interacted with society. By engaging in a discussion of the history of these widely contrasting types of vocal performers as well as the pedagogy of their specific vocalisms, I will evaluate their unique presentations of exaggerated masculinity, illustrating the strange correlation between metal's use of falsetto and the barbaric practice of creating Castrati.

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Keywords:  metal, castrato, castrati, opera, falsetto, gender studies, masculinity, king diamond, screaming, heavy metal, vocal pedagogy