It’s easy to think that upon its inception the Internet
was a brand new concept, but cellist Yo Yo Ma believes that like
most things in the world, it is an old idea reinvented with new
technology.
The Internet of antiquity was the Silk Road, snaking from Japan
and China to the Mediterranean and the Middle East.
To this end, Ma founded the Silk Road Project, an organization
that hopes to use the openness and creative exchange from the past
to inspire more openness and dialogue.
“There were many periods of globalization in the past 2000
years,” Ma said. “(Looking) at what kind of exchanges
there were, what were the golden eras of creativity, it seems that
a lot of the greatest creative moments in world heritage happened
in the most global times.”
Ma and his Silk Road Ensemble will visit Royce Hall tonight to
demonstrate the riches of his new cultural enterprise. On the
program will be pieces composed by people from India, Iran, China,
Persia and France. Many of the pieces challenge western classical
ideas with largely improvised music and foreign instruments,
despite the fact many of the underlying messages and traditions of
the music are very similar.
For example, Ma compares Sufi music in India to the music of
Beethoven, which used sonata form (basically an ABA structure) as a
means to transcendence. Sufi music also seeks to achieve
transcendence, but does so in a different manner.
Ma also points out that various western instruments, such as the
guitar, have their roots in other cultures. They were passed around
during exchange on the Silk Road, where history has shown that
Buddhists, Christians and Muslims all lived in proximity of each
other and shared ideas. The guitar actually comes from the single
string Central Asian tar, which became the dutar (a two-stringed
instrument), and later developed in Persia as the sitar, or
three-stringed instrument.
The name of the cultural game is hybridization, the sometimes
random act of marrying things together to form something culturally
vital and create new traditions. Ma himself hopes his Silk Road
Project will be a similar force as it commissions new pieces from
composers around the world to educate audiences on different ways
of viewing the world.
Ma names Persia, India and Azerbaijan as countries that have
classical music traditions. Western audiences, however, have
notoriously viewed music from other traditions as subordinate to
itself, and regarded change as the kiss of death.
“One of the worst things you can do to a culture is
ghettoize it or keep it the same,” Ma said. “What you
want to do is make people conscious of (the fact that) what they
have is precious.”
Ma sees his project as an experiment. Certainly,
self-experimentation has been a hallmark of Ma’s career,
going from collaborations with Bobby McFerrin, John Williams,
Sesame Street’s Elmo to tango composer Astor Piazzolla. Ma
grew up in France, was schooled at Harvard, and has traveled the
world, performing for the better part of the last 25 years. In
tonight’s concert, he even leaves behind his Stradivarius (a
multi-million dollar cello) to play a piece with the morin khuur,
the Mongolian horse head fiddle.
Recently, Ma has collaborated with Philip Glass on the score for
Godfrey Reggio’s film, “Naqoyqatsi.” Ma’s
decision to work with Glass was based largely on a kind of
ideological kinship. When Glass met Indian raga guru Ravi Shankar
in the 1960s, his whole idea of music changed. Ma hopes everyone
comes to that pivotal musical experience in their lives, whether
through his Silk Road Project, or elsewhere.
“Through traveling, you find people telling you things
that they know to be true that is a different perspective than what
I know,” Ma said. “That over a period of time, you
realize there are many different types of truths, there are many
different types of classical music.”