______________________________________________________________________________ LARA PEARSON COARTICULATION AND GESTURE: AN ANALYSIS OF MELODIC MOVEMENT IN SOUTH INDIAN RAGA PERFORMANCE ______________________________________________________________________________ Karṇāṭaka saṅgīta, referred to here as Karnatak music, 1 is a genre of art and devotional music which developed in the royal courts and temples of South India over a period of many centuries and still enjoys popularity in India today. 2 The style comprises both compositional and improvisational elements, with the two overlapping, as compositions may be modified by the performer and improvisations draw on characteristic phrases handed down from teacher to pupil. This article will focus on the element known as rāga ālāpana, a form of unmetred improvisation. A short section of such improvisation will be analysed here from a novel perspective employing the concept of coarticulation, a phenomenon more commonly discussed in the field of phonetics, where it is defined as the variation that a speech sound undergoes when influenced by neighbouring sounds (Hardcastle and Hewlett 1999, p. i). Following from this definition, the aim of the present study is to account for variations in the performance of Karnatak musical units known as svaras (the scale degrees of a rāga) and gamakas (ornaments) by way of coarticulation, looking at the influence of context on the realisation of musical units. This analysis focuses more on coarticulation in the music itself than in the movements that create it; but since the two are closely related, some discussion of the physical motion of sound-producing gestures is included here. With this analysis I seek to provide an account of small-scale melodic movement in the Karnatak style, drawing more from musical practice than from music theory and focusing on the dynamic processes that form the style rather than on a categorisation of discrete elements. My inquiry finds an apt analogy in Barbara Kühnert and Francis Nolan’s insight regarding the presence of coarticulation in handwriting. They note that the tail of a ‘y’ is drawn differently depending on its context: it remains open when written at the end of a word but is closed with a loop if followed by another letter (1999, p. 9). I suggest that, just as handwriting can be conceptualised as the trace of human movement on paper, so can music be thought of as the trace of human movement through sound. Here I shall be asking whether svaras, the basic conceptual units of Karnatak music, similarly vary in the way they are rendered during performance owing to the influence of their immediate context.