Ancient Trade Route Inspires Ambitious Cultural Exchange

Cellist Yo-Yo Ma is talking about Central Asia while, thousands of miles away, the United States is bombing it.

For years, Ma has been planning a project that’s now come to fruition: an East-meets-West musical overview of the cultures and countries linked by the network of trading routes known as the Silk Road. Tonight, an international gathering of 13 musicians--dubbed the Silk Road Ensemble--will join Ma in Washington for the first concert of its American tour.

The Kennedy Center Concert Hall performance will launch, in this country, the ongoing Silk Road Project, which includes commissions, educational events and even a book; it will continue at least through next summer, when the music of the Silk Road will be the subject of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the Mall. (The only California dates thus far announced are for next April at UC Berkeley.)

Tonight’s program, presented by the Washington Performing Arts Society, includes new music by composers from Mongolia, China, Iran and Azerbaijan. The historic Silk Road, which thrived for a millennium before and after the birth of Christ, passed through all of them, linking the ancient Mediterranean world to the empire of China.

Culture was exchanged as readily as dry goods, and as Ma points out, the West imported from Silk Road societies important catalysts to its future technological and military preeminence, including the magnetic compass, gunpowder and the printing press. There was also an exchange of poetry, literature, art and music, and that exchange has fascinated Ma for years.

“The more we look at these cultures, the more we understand the people and their music, it gets more and more difficult to see boundaries between them,” the 46-year-old Ma says. For him, music is about communication, learning, epiphanies, sharing; different cultures go in different directions and develop diverse preoccupations, but a deeper commonality links them.

As one scholar involved in the project puts it, the Silk Road is about “both transnational music and local musical traditions.” Ma, it seems, also believes in an even higher power for the art form, a power to make universal connections and an ability to influence people and cultures toward mutual harmony and away from division and strife.

“It’s not about McWorld,” he says, meaning it’s not meant merely as pop ethnography. Nor does it aspire to be strictly a preservation project for foreign music.

“The idea is to make innovation and tradition sit down together,” he says. Translation: The project will commission new pieces rather than merely present folk musicians playing traditional music alongside Western players.

This is in many ways the safest route for the project, yet also a dangerous one. Safe, because Ma is a Western cello player, and although he’s happy to try his hand at the Mongolian horse-head fiddle, his strength is on his own instrument, playing music designed for it. The dangers are manifold. There’s the specter of the collaborations between Ravi Shankar and Yehudi Menuhin, which created a new kind of easy-listening genus without the two musical cultures ever fusing into something new or compelling.

Then there’s the odd habit of Western listeners conflating different ideas of “foreign,” of confusing sounds that are unfamiliar ethnically with anything that sounds new. The confusion is understandable. One of Azerbaijani composer Franghiz Ali-Zadeh’s pieces includes a prepared piano, with the strings plucked and hammered and otherwise altered; the idea is to imitate local instrumental sounds, but it’s an innovation borrowed straight from John Cage. Chen Yi, whose percussion concerto for Western-style orchestra received its American premiere by the National Symphony Orchestra last week, contributes a piece for pipa (Asian lute), cello and violin to the Silk Road Project.

In a museum, if you remove the label, that thing on the wall could be either a tribal mask or a sculpture from Paris. But American classical music audiences don’t willingly undergo disorientation. If the Silk Road Project succeeds--if Ma can get audiences to respond to microtonal Iranian modes and complex tabla rhythms--he may bring audiences to a place where it’s possible for rapprochement with modernity.