Of Two Arias and Nine Ragas: Analysing Monteverdi through a Karnatik Lens

Abstract

ABSTRACTCommencing from an elaboration of extant theoretical and analytical positions in Monteverdi studies, this article closely analyses two of the most well‐known arias from Claudio Monteverdi's earliest opera,L'Orfeo(1607), from the melodic perspective of the Karnatik music of South India. In identifying ragas within Monteverdi's melodic structures, this approach evidences the author's practice‐based explorations of the arias while harking back to global influences that have shaped the identity formation of Western music. This approach to music analysis serves two primary purposes. First, it offers one way to decolonise and reimagine the music that emerged from an essentially multicultural early modern Europe. Second, in privileging artist‐researchers’ embodied oral aural knowledges, which emerge from practice, the approach makes a case for analytical approaches which aid in practice and which offer complementary lenses through which to view locate knowledges that are complex, embodied and non‐Western in their theoretical and analytical bases.