Durham University Project – Khyal: Music and Imagination

Khyal: Music and Imagination is an AHRC-funded project based at Durham University which will run from January 2016 and which aims to stimulate new forms of artistic production based on interactions between performers, ethnomusicologists and visual artists, and to promote public engagement with music and visual arts.

Durham University are seeking to appoint an enthusiastic and talented artist at the early stage of his/her career.

The project builds on 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. 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 produce original artwork in media of their choice inspired by this material. While this work continues, we will run a series of school workshops with GemArts, 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 iPad application 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 in November 2017. We are already planning to take the exhibition on tour nationally and internationally, and we have secured a presence in Durham’s Oriental Museum to develop it into a public event in autumn 2017/spring 2018. We will also give public presentations drawing on this material at other venues, including the Darbar Festival in London.

Click here for call to applications.