Khyal: Music and Imagination

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"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.