Khyal: Music and Imagination

"Khyal: Music and Imagination" builds on fundamental research into the ways in which Indian musicians and audiences experience and imagine classical vocal performance, using its insights to generate new kinds of engagement and creativity. The project brings together, first of all, musicians, ethnomusicologists and visual artists to explore the khyal genre and stimulate the artists to produce original works of visual art inspired by the music and by existing interview material. This new artistic production in turn facilitates new forms of engagement accessible to a wide range of people: in schools, at concerts and festivals, and at museums and galleries.
In the first instance we will bring together a diverse group of people into a project team: visual artists based in both the UK and India, ethnomusicologists, and performing musicians. We will discuss findings of our earlier research, particularly as it relates to the moods and emotions expressed in the music and the role of visual imagery in both performance and listening. Artists will be introduced to our extensive collection of audiovisual recordings and interview transcripts, from which relevant source material will be selected. They will be commissioned to produced original artwork in media of their choice (e.g. paintings, video installations) inspired by this material. While this work continues, we will run a series of school workshops with a local arts organisation with a strong track record in this area, Gem Arts, in the course of which school children too will be encouraged to engage with the idea of music and visual imagery and to produce their own art works. At the same time, we will develop a simple interactive app which allows users to engage with audiovisual recordings of Indian music.
All of these elements - original research materials, interactive app, professional and school children's artwork - will be combined in a public exhibition presented at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle. We will also give public presentations drawing on this material at other venues, including the Darbar Festival in London, the UK's largest festival of Indian music. The aim is to increase engagement with this genre of music and with the interface between music and visual arts more generally, to facilitate new forms of creative engagement amongst school children, and to foster dialogue between academics and creative artists.

This projects aims to engage a range of beneficiaries. These include the third sector (in particular galleries and music venues, and professional musicians and visual artists), the commercial sector (in particular IT developers), local communities (including secondary school teachers and children), and the wider public of music and art lovers in general.

In order to maximize the impact of our project we intend to work in close collaboration with three partners as well as our beneficiaries to the extent that we envisage our activities and outputs to be co-produced with them as much as possible.

The activities/outputs through which our work will generate impact include:

1) The commission of original artworks and of an original interactive application;
2) The delivery of school workshops and the preparation of didactic materials for schoolteachers;
3) The organisation of music performances and a multimedia exhibition;
4) The preparation of a multimedia website as well as printed materials;
5) The delivery of public talks and engagement events.

Different groups of people will benefit from specific activities in different ways. Detailed examples include the following:

a) The visual artists and singers' artistic development will benefit from the engagement in a new form of interdisciplinary dialogue, while their careers will benefit from the exposure provided by the project. The visual artists' careers will also benefit from the preparation of a commissioned work and the experience of engagement in workshops.
b) The school children's creativity will benefit from the exposure to new music, and from the engagement in an interdisciplinary exercise which will provide them with an opportunity to reflect on cross-modal experiences; their confidence will be encouraged by the ambitious but realistic prospect to have their artwork exhibited alongside that of professional artists in a public exhibition.
c) Music and Art teachers will benefit from a new interdisciplinary collaboration, while the wider community of educators will benefit from the didactic materials which will result from this experience and which we intend to make widely available.
d) Our project will contribute to the development of a new way of understanding music and its intersection with the visual arts: through a range of engagement events, talks, music performance, the preparation of a multimedia exhibition, and through a dedicate multimedia project website as well as readers of magazines which popularize research, our work will benefit the wider public of music and art lovers, arts promoters, venues and programmes.