I put this in the edit description, but I cut the castrati example; it was too full of historical inaccuracies that seemed to be fitting a particular just-so narrative of history but deviating from the actual facts. (Castrati were not there to "replace women" in opera, as women were part of opera from its early days. The practice actually predates the invention of opera and was more associated with church music, and preserving the voices of celebrated boy sopranos.) I was considering cleaning it up, but I feel like it's kind of a stretch to apply something that was a practice rather than a particular musical work, group, composer, singer, genre, etc. to the page. If people really think it should be here, though, I'm fine with discussing how to re-word it. It just doesn't really seem like it's what the trope is calling for.
(FTR, I don't like to go much into my IRL background, but I'm a music professor with a Ph.D. in historical musicology.)
I put this in the edit description, but I cut the castrati example; it was too full of historical inaccuracies that seemed to be fitting a particular just-so narrative of history but deviating from the actual facts. (Castrati were not there to "replace women" in opera, as women were part of opera from its early days. The practice actually predates the invention of opera and was more associated with church music, and preserving the voices of celebrated boy sopranos.) I was considering cleaning it up, but I feel like it's kind of a stretch to apply something that was a practice rather than a particular musical work, group, composer, singer, genre, etc. to the page. If people really think it should be here, though, I'm fine with discussing how to re-word it. It just doesn't really seem like it's what the trope is calling for.
(FTR, I don't like to go much into my IRL background, but I'm a music professor with a Ph.D. in historical musicology.)