Hybridising Karnatik Music and Early Opera: A Journey Through Voice, Word, and Gesture

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the ways in which hybridising Karnatik music and early opera can inform an artist-researcher’s effort to achieve intercultural musico-poetic works and performances. It highlights two contentious aspects in contemporary Karnatik scholarship: that text deserves more attention in the performance of Karnatik vocal music and that a congruency between textual and musical aspects can be mediated through gesture. I approach this research from the perspective of a female Karnatik vocal performer, and centralise my artistic practice. In doing so, I reflect on socio-cultural issues pertaining to each of the performance cultures. Accordingly, my research methodology can be identified as socio-culturally interrogative artistic research in music. As its methods, this model interweaves historical, comparative and analytical musicology, with experimentation and reflection, music analysis, and performance analysis. By examining, from a Karnatik perspective, Claudio Monteverdi’s compositional model for musical declamation, and the notion of expressivity through voice and gesture in early opera, I derive a decahedral framework for hybridity. This acts as a conceptual foundation for my creative explorations to synergise as two core projects. Both projects build on specific conceptual parameters from the decahedral framework across the paradigms of content-building and delivery. Firstly, in the Thiruppavai Project, Tamil poetry from the ninth century is set to music and performed with continuo accompaniment. Secondly, in Monteverdi Reimagined, I extend the aesthetic of hybridity into the context of Monteverdi’s first opera, L’Orfeo (1607). This yields the Tamil–Italian bilingual live performance of Monteverdi Reimagined as the consolidated outcome of hybridity. This research provides insights that are relevant to the fields of intercultural hybridity in music-making and music performance research. It offers one approach to combining two culturally diverse genres of music. In its journey towards hybridity, this research problematises and practically explores a female Karnatik singer’s embodied experience and the role of gesture in promoting self-expression and self-assertion. In addressing these two issues that are both under-represented and highly pertinent to the current controversies around the #MeToo movement, the research contributes to much-needed feminist scholarship in Karnatik music. The research also contributes to scholarship in the fields of music and movement, and intercultural approaches to voice studies. By proposing and implementing a methodological model that harnesses the artmaking to a wider social context, the research offers a fresh perspective on methodology in the dynamic field of artistic research in music.