About two-thirds of the way into Morgan Neville’s new documentary film, “The Music of Strangers,” its central character says, “Everybody is afraid of going somewhere they haven’t gone before. But you build enough trust within a group, and sometimes you can turn fear into joy.”
That character is renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and soaring after his words is the wailing sound of the gaita, a bagpipe known for centuries around northern Spain and Portugal.
The plaintive instrument is mastered by Galician musician Cristina Pato, who’s seen, as the scene shifts, in a thrilling interplay with a battery of percussion, stringed instruments and a traditional Japanese shakuhachi flute.
This is the Silk Road Ensemble, which is truly the central character of the documentary that will be screened, beginning July 8, at Amherst Cinema — just in time to whet audiences’ appetite for Silk Road’s Aug. 7 live performance at Tanglewood Music Center.
It was at Tanglewood that Ma — who was introduced to the world by Leonard Bernstein as a 7-year-old prodigy and went on to record more than 90 albums and win 18 Grammy awards — first assembled an eclectic assortment of virtuoso musicians from around the globe in 2000.
Masters of traditional instruments like the Chinese pipa (lute), Indian tabla, Persian kamancheh (bowed cello), Chinese sheng (mouth organ), together with instruments more familiar to Western audiences, responded to Ma’s Bernstein-inspired “search for a universal musical language.”
“The clearest reason for music, for culture, is that it gives us meaning,” Ma says in the new documentary.
With seemingly boundless curiosity, openness and inventiveness, Silk Road comes alive with a spectrum of rhythms, exciting and exotic, with a gamut of musical colors, sometimes shrill, sweet, soaring, sensuous.
The 17-member ensemble, which has performed for more than 2 million people in 33 countries, grew out of Ma’s own search for cultural identity as the French-born son of Chinese emigrants brought to New York when he was 7.
“Being an immigrant, you’re always asking very basic questions: who you are, why you’re someplace and how is this place different from another place?” Ma told The Recorder recently. “When we left France, the French would say, ‘Why would you go to the United States?’”
“My parents would say, ‘China, it’s such a great place. … So why aren’t we living there?’”
“I was kind of always a little puzzled when people would say, ‘We are the best,’ because not everybody can be right.”
A little like ‘Where’s Waldo?’ “as a traveling musician, you get dropped into places and you feel like you’re in surreal surroundings. And then you ask yourself, ‘What gives? What is this place? Who are these people? Why do they act the way they do? In that sense, Silk Road is a natural outgrowth of actually trying to see … with the pride and maybe even arrogance of saying, ‘Oh, I’ve traveled a lot, I know a lot of the world. But actually, I don’t.’”
During a 1990 performance visit to Tel Aviv, and then a royal invitation to visit Jordan’s National Conservatory in Amman, Ma listened to two young students play music. He asked them,, “What does this music mean to you,” he recalls, “The answers they gave were so rich and profound and poetic and moving that that was the moment I said, ‘I have to do something …. Their understanding of the inner life is more like the way we may have thought about the inner life in 19th Century. … I thought, we’ve got to kind of capture this.”
For nearly a decade after that, as he crisscrossed the planet playing cello, while keenly listening to and ravenously exploring musical languages, Ma began discussions about a vision of culture in the world.
With the Silk Road Project in 1998, he set out on a grand adventure to bring together a diverse mix of skilled musicians “from Venice all the way to Istanbul, through Central Asia, Mongolia and China.”
The result, that summer of 2000, was a workshop of 60 musicians and composers assembled at the Tanglewood Institute of Music, in what former Silk Road Project Director Theodore Levin describes as, “the Manhattan Project of Music.”
No one was sure what would happen to what one ensemble member recalls was envisioned as three-year experiment.
Jump ahead a year after Silk Road’s creation — Silk Road’s members questioned whether the group had a future — and the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on New York.
“In the face of xenophobia,” Ma reflects in the documentary, he thought that it might not be possible to continue. Yet ultimately, “We had a responsibility to work harder,” he said.
A master of the kamanchech, a Persian bowed lute, Kayhan Kalhor had been in exile from Iran for two years and had moved just 10 days earlier to New York, where he later made a living driving cab and working in a restaurant while playing his traditional, cello-like instrument in the wake of cultural suspicion following the Twin Tower attacks.
“That kind of galvanized, directly or indirectly, the effort of what we were doing,” recalls violist Nicholas Cords, who’d just completed studies at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music and was performing in New York when called to join Silk Road at Tanglewood.
“We saw this kind of a cross-cultural dialogue we’d started to be a really import thing at the moment. It was sort of an antidote to what we were seeing in the media at that time,” said Cords.
Kalhor says, “We are not our political identities. Nobody remembers who the king was when Beethoven lived. But culture stays. Language stays as a part of the culture, music stays as a part of the culture.”
“Wedding,” a soulful composition by Syrian clarinetist Kinan Azmeh — whose life, like that of Kalhor and Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu Man, was dislodged by war and social upheaval — was written as part of a suite in 2012 after a year of feeling unable to compose in the aftermath of his country’s uprising. It’s recorded on “Sing Me Home,” the ensemble’s new CD.
It’s “a little prayer for home … dedicated to all the Syrians who have managed to fall in love in the past five years” since the crisis began.
“I think culture might be the the only survivor of violent times,” the artist tells Ma in an interview on the SilkRoadProject.org website.
“Art is not a medication; that’s what we do naturally, as humans. … It doesn’t stop a bomb from falling, it doesn’t feed somebody who is hungry. It doesn’t feed a political prisoner. It can motivate people to be proactive.”
Ma, who’s been awarded the National Medal of Arts and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and has been a United Nations Messenger of Peace since 2006, responds, “Art prevents people from shutting down. It keeps the windows open … that’s the humanity.”
He told the BBC recently, “If we look at the structure of the world’s governments, peoples, and institutions, there is a lack of trust. People constantly misunderstand each other’s goals and intentions. And I think the basis of art — anything to do with music, for example — is that you can’t look at something just critically. You have to look at it empathetically. … Art reaches the gut and it also reaches critical thinking. And that’s really important.”
The Silk Road, an ancient trade route through Asia to China, brought together travelers from across the planet who traded their cultures, languages and ideas, as well as their spices, cloth and other goods.
It was the perfect symbol when Yo-Yo Ma set out in 1998 to examine the possibilities of what he called The Silk Road Project to connect “musicians, composers, artists and audiences around the world” and “promote multicultural artistic collaboration” inspired by a genuine curiosity and heartfelt openness.
Today, in addition to the ensemble, which tours the globe two or three times a year, the project also includes an annual week-long Global Musicians Workshop at Indiana’s Depauw University, as well as an Arts and Passion-Driven Learning Institute at Harvard, and other programs for teachers around the world.
Silk Road recently joined forces with Participant Media and FilmAid International to bring a series of arts workshops and film screenings to Jordan this summer. It will offer in-depth arts experiences to an estimated 1,000 children and adults displaced by the Syrian conflict.
More than anything, Silk Road Ensemble is an expression of the connections and coming together of traditions — and an opening to possibilities as members explore the world’s seemingly infinite cultures, defying and denying those neat, restrictive bins we assign to different musical genres, like “classical” and “folk.”
The in-vogue designation, “world music,” says Cords, “came out of a need to commercially define something in the record store, or the online marketplace.”
In the delicate balance between a mishmash of cultures, which can trample on the richness of each tradition, and a purity that’s difficult to maintain, given dynamic human interactions, Silk Road has, over the past 15 years, avoided what some early critics called “cultural tourism,” or diluting of traditions.
With integrity, and a conviction for genuineness, Silk Road has found its own voice as a musical ensemble, Cords says.
“I think we can more readily attack new things and more quickly put our stamp on it as the result of playing for audiences all over world, playing in concert halls and educational settings,” he adds.
As trust has grown among the musicians themselves, sharing their traditions in world-stage moments, as well as each other’s homes, the group has evolved to being more of a family that responds to changing, shifting ideas of its members, says Cord.
“Every tradition we know in the world is the result of successful invention,” says Ma, “A tradition before it is named is not a tradition until someone says, ‘This is a tradition.’”
At one point in “The Music of Strangers,” Shakuhachi player Kojiro Umezaki explains, “The arts is more about opening yourself to possibility.” He arcs his finger through the air as he adds: “Possibility links to hope. We all need hope.”
On the Web at: www.silkroadproject.org or
http://bit.ly/1ZWOMd0 or
www.amherstcinema.org