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A castrato (Italian; pl.: castrati) is a male singer who underwent castration before puberty in order to retain singing voice equivalent to that of a soprano, mezzo-soprano, or contralto. The voice can also occur in one who, due to an endocrinological condition, never reaches sexual maturity .
A countertenor (also contra tenor) is a type of classical male singing voice whose vocal range is equivalent to that of the female contralto or mezzo-soprano voice types, generally extending from around G 3 to D 5 or E 5, [1] although a sopranist (a specific kind of countertenor) may match the soprano's range of around C 4 to C 6. [2]
Countertenor voices span a broad range, covering C4 to C6 (some as high as F6) to a range just above tenor covering D3 to about D5. [citation needed] Countertenor subtypes: Countertenors are often broken down into three subcategories: sopranist or "male soprano", the haute-contre, and the castrato.
A sopranist is able to sing in the soprano vocal range which is approximately between C 4 and C 6, though at times may expand somewhat higher or lower.Men of all voice types can possess the wide-ranged and effective falsetto or head voice needed to produce the contralto, mezzo-soprano and soprano vocal ranges.
Occasionally the meane line would be sung by a combination of treble (boy soprano) and countertenor voices. Tr is short for treble. Today treble typically is used to refer to children's voices, but during the era of Tallis the term was applied to the highest vocal line, and it could be sung by adult women, boy sopranos, or castrati.
It is a type of tenor voice with a compass not much wider than that of the coeval baritenor, but able to sustain far higher tessiture.It means that the basic range remained substantially the classic one, from C 3 to C 5: only the best baritenors, however, were able to reach up to such heights and used to pass anyway to the falsettone (or strengthened falsetto) register [2] about G 4; for ...
Watch Thompson, Samberg, and Rudolph in the "Castrati" sketch above. Saturday Night Live airs Saturdays at 11:30 p.m. ET/8:30 p.m. PT on NBC and Peacock. Read the original article on Entertainment ...
To answer your question, a countertenor is neither a vocal range or genre identification but a voice type. The term countertenor is a classical music term and really shouldn't be used elsewhere as there are certain assumptions inherent in the terms use and definition that would make it falsely translated to other genres.