Khyal

Khyal (or Khayal, Hindi: ख़्याल, Urdu: خیال) is the modern genre of classical singing in North India. Its name comes from an Arabic word meaning "imagination". It appeared more recently than dhrupad, and it provides greater scope for improvisation. Like all Indian classical music, khyal is modal, with a single melodic line and no harmonic parts. The modes are called raga, and each raga is a complicated framework of melodic rules.

Characteristics

Khyal bases itself on a repertoire of short songs (two to eight lines); a khyal song is called a bandish. Every singer generally renders the same bandish differently, with only the text and the raga remaining the same. Khyal bandishes are composed either in a variant of Urdu/Hindi or in Persian, and these compositions cover diverse topics, such as romantic or divine love, praise of kings or gods, the seasons, dawn and dusk, and the pranks of Krishna, and they can have symbolism and imagery. The bandish is divided into two parts — the sthayi (or asthayi) and the antara. The sthayi often uses notes from the lower octave and the lower half of the middle octave, while the antara ascends to the tonic of the upper octave and beyond before descending and linking back to the sthayi. The singer uses the composition as raw material for improvisation, accompanied by a harmonium or bowed string instrument such as the sarangi or violin playing off the singer's melody line, a set of two hand drums (the tabla), and a drone in the background. The role of the accompanist playing the melody-producing instrument is to provide continuity when the singer pauses for breath, using small variations of the singer's phrases or parts thereof. While there is a wide variety of rhythmic patterns that could be used by the percussionist, khyal performances typically use Ektaal, Jhoomra, Jhaptaal, Tilwada, Teentaal, Rupak, and Adachautaal ^[1].

A typical khyal performance uses two songs — the bada khyal or great khyal, in slow tempo (vilambit laya), comprises most of the performance, while the chhota khyal (small khyal), in fast tempo (drut laya), is used as a finale and is usually in the same raga but a different taal. The songs are sometimes preceded by improvised alap to sketch the basic raga structure without drum accompaniment; alap is given much less room in khyal than in other forms of classical music in north India.

As the songs are short, and performances long (half an hour or more), the lyrics lose some of their importance. Improvisation is added to the songs in a number of ways: for example improvising new melodies to the words, using the syllables of the songs to improvise material (bol-bant, bol-taans), singing the names of the scale degrees — sa, re, ga, ma, pa, dha and ni (sargam) — or simply interspersing phrases sung on the vowel A, akaar taans. Taans are one of the major distinguishing features of the khyal. Now and then, the singer returns to the song, especially its first line, as a point of reference. Besides the vilambit (slow) and drut (fast) tempos, a performance may include ati-vilambit (ultra-slow), madhya (medium speed) and ati-drut (super-fast) tempos. Song forms such as taranas or tappas are sometimes used to round off a khyal performance.

History

Khayal was popularized by Niyamat Khan (a.k.a. Sadarang) and his nephew Firoz Khan (a.k.a. Adarang), both musicians in the court of Muhammad Shah Rangile (1719-1748). It seems likely that khyal already existed at the time, although perhaps not in the present form. The compositions of Sadarang and Adarang employ the theme of Hindi love-poetry. The khyal of this period also acquired the dignity of Dhrupad and the manner of the veena in its glide or meend, plus a number of musical alankars that were introduced into the body of the composition. The gharana system arose out of stylistic rendering of the khyal by various subsequent generations of musicians. The gharanas have distinct styles of presenting the khyal — how much to emphasize and how to enunciate the words of the composition, when to sing the sthayi and antara, whether to sing an unmetered alap in the beginning, what kinds of improvisations to use, how much importance to give to the rhythmic aspect, and so on.

With India united into a country from various scattered princely states, with royal courts and the zamindari system abolished, and with modern communications and recording technology, stylistic borders have become blurred and many singers today have studied with teachers from more than one gharana. This used to be uncommon, and a few decades ago teachers used to forbid students to even hear other gharana singers perform, not allowing them to buy records or listen to the radio. Today, as always, a singer is expected to develop an individual style, albeit one that is demonstrably linked to tradition.

The sarangi bows out

A relatively recent trend, lamented by many, is the demise of the bowed-string sarangi as an accompanying instrument. Today one more often hears the harmonium organ, which is relatively inflexible in that it cannot follow the singer's portamento. The sarangi is on the remove because it is extremely difficult to play and because it has become associated with a lower-class prostitution milieu; in the absence of a violin tradition in North India, the harmonium was there to fill the gap. Experiments with simplified, fretted sarangi clones such as the dilruba have not become very popular. The harmonium was for many years banned on All India Radio but is accepted today. Almost universally, though, bowed-string accompaniment is appreciated as more genuine.

References

• Some words about Khyal Retrieved 2007-06-10
• Khyal - Fantasy in Music Retrieved 2007-06-10