FILM & MUSIC: CLASSICAL: CARAVANS IN THE DESERT: YO-YO MA’S SILK ROAD PROJECT BRINGS TOGETHER THE MUSIC OF THE CULTURES ALONG THE ANCIENT TRADE ROUTE FROM ASIA TO EUROPE.
Paul Cutts

The Guardian
Published: Sep 07, 2007
United Kingdom

Last year, a cellist made his solitary way down the marbled hallways of
power in Washington DC. In front of the House committee on government
reform, he pleaded with politicians to relax the visa restrictions
that were causing havoc for international artists hoping to perform
in the US. It’s rare for a classical musician to have the ear of
political leaders, a position rock stars such as Bono and Bob Geldof
seem to have monopolised in the media. But Yo-Yo Ma has that status,
in real and fictional life (he performed for the president in an
episode of The West Wing).

"While very few Americans have the opportunity to travel to rural
India, and even fewer to rural Kyrgyzstan," Ma testified, "the arts
allow everyone to catch a glimpse into these other worlds through their
music, their dance and their art. Encouraging artists and institutions
to foster these artistic exchanges – bringing foreign musicians to
this country and sending our performers to visit them – is crucial."

It’s not suprising Ma takes a global perspective. He was born in Paris
to Chinese parents in 1955, and moved to New York aged seven. "My
biggest goal in life, even as a child, was the wish to understand,"
explains a youthful and fresh-faced Ma when we meet on a wet Sunday in
Manchester. "When we moved to America, everything was so confusing to
me. The world was hard to understand because we had moved countries
and languages. But it was also impossible for me to make choices
between cultures. Why, as an eight-year-old boy, should I give up
lovely croissants and go for white bread just because I lived in the
US now, not Paris?"

It’s exactly that cross-cultural awareness that has fuelled the Silk
Road project, of which Ma is founder and artistic director. It’s an
artistic exploration of the cultures found along the ancient trade
routes connecting Asia with the Mediterranean.

Many of the Silk Road musicians first came together at a workshop at
the famed Tanglewood Music Centre in Massachusetts in 2000, under Ma’s
artistic direction. Since then, various combinations of these artists –
from Armenian duduk virtuoso Gevorg Dabaghyan to Mongolian composer
Byambasuren Sharav – have intermingled western and non-western clas
sical, folk and popular music in Silk Road performances and commissions
in Europe, Asia and North America.

Today, the ensemble is an ever-evolving group of musicians and
composers giving concerts and making acclaimed recordings. It even
led to a year-long Silk Road festival and education initiative in
Chicago that culminated this June and inspired New Impossibilities,
Ma’s latest recording with the city’s famous symphony orchestra.

As a geographical reality, the Silk Road encompasses more than 3
billion people – over 60% of the world’s population. But to Ma, as an
idea it exists everywhere: "When we talk about a Silk Road experience,
we don’t mean simply the cultural exchange brought about by caravans
travelling across deserts, but something much broader. Whether the
intercultural development of the tango in Argentina or the transport
of indigo dye from India to Cape Verde to the Caribbean, to the term
blues to the jeans we wear today, the collaboration and creativity
of mini Silk Roads have given birth to some of the most extraordinary
cultural evolutions."

In an age when the countries along the Silk Road have become the
faultline of cultural and political conflict, Ma’s project has far
deeper resonances.

Its scope has inevitably led to major challenges – not least the
very visa chaos about which Ma complained on Capitol Hill. Two of
his Iranian musicians, despite having performed in the States eight
times before, had to fly to a consular office in Dubai twice over
three months before obtaining visas for a recent US tour. The process
cost $5,000 and much resentment.

But Ma insists the project is "a way of examining our differences
without looking at present-day political realities". Ma also sees
the Silk Road project as a way of challenging classical music’s own
orthodoxies and insecurities in an age dominated by pop music. "Nobody
today grows up listening to just one type of music – it’s impossible,"
says the musician who, in 2002, performed with Sting during the
opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. "I’m
neither optimistic nor pessimistic about the outlook for classical
music. I think if we partake in a tradition, we have to ask how it
is going to live on. You have to ask if what you are doing is seeding
something, something you actually believe in. I could be playing the
cello and just figured out the most fantastic way to play a phrase,
but nobody would realise that point unless I could communicate it to
them effectively."

Just as Ma’s willingness to learn isn’t restricted by musical genre,
nor is his determination to communicate restricted by medium. It’s one
reason why his appearances have not been confined to concert halls, why
he has also been willing to appear on TV shows such as Sesame Street:
"So often, music education seems to be about bringing kids to the
concert hall, which is great, but on the TV show I was a guest invited
into their world. That’s really powerful, and it means that the cello
and a cellist is never going to be an unfamiliar figure to those kids."

As well as his discography of 70-plus recordings and regular TV
appearances, he’s also exploited the potential of film. In the 1990s,
he made Inspired By Bach, a memorable series of films based around
the six Bach Cello Suites, the musical Mount Everest every cellist
hopes one day to climb and for which Ma has won one of his numerous
Grammy awards.

The films were collaborations with – among others – choreographer
Mark Morris and garden designer Julie Moir Messervy in Canada. As
well as providing further evidence of Ma’s intellectual openness and
curiosity, it’s also a tantalising glimpse into what directions he
might have taken had he chosen not to pursue music.

"My true passion is to contextualise," he says. "I don’t know whether
I would have the talent to be anything other than a musician – but
growing and cultivating is what musicians are all about. So, in a
way, the film about the garden was a metaphor for life. Music is very
ephemeral, but I’ve always thought that the creation of music was what
made us evolve from hunter-gatherers. Like music, a garden is not just
about creating something beautiful – it’s also about the struggle
to get there. And, like music, it’s not about winning anything,
it’s about being able to build something over a period of time.

"It’s what I think we are trying to do with the Silk Road," he
concludes, "but there’s still a huge amount of digging to do to touch
on those shared connections."

Yo-Yo Ma’s latest Silk Road recording, New Impossibilities, is out
now on Sony Classical.