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| International noise
connection Yo Yo Ma's Silk Road project explores riches of musical backgrounds
DAILY BRUIN SENIOR STAFF hho@media.ucla.edu 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.
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." |
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