19 March 2009

Yo-Yo Ma Project Celebrates a Decade of Musical Collaboration

North American concert tour features Azerbaijani, Uzbek and U.S. composers

The Silk Road Ensemble uses Asian and Western instruments in their adaptation of the opera Layla and Majnun.

By Carlos Aranaga
Staff Writer

Washington — Cello maestro Yo-Yo Ma is marking 10 years of the Silk Road Project, an ambitious educational and artistic initiative that highlights the musical traditions of the lands along the historic Silk Road trading route and celebrates East-West musical interplay.

“We live in a world of increasing awareness and interdependence,” said Ma, the artistic director and founder of the Silk Road Project. “I believe that music can act as a magnet to draw people together.” 

To celebrate its work, the Silk Road Ensemble, the project’s performance group, is on a six-city North America tour, stopping in Providence, Rhode Island; Washington; Boston; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Minneapolis; and Toronto. The ensemble is a collective of approximately 60 internationally renowned musicians, composers, arrangers, visual artists and storytellers from more than 20 countries.  Over the last decade, the Silk Road Ensemble has performed in 25 countries.

NEW WORKS PREMIERED

The ensemble will perform two separate programs during the 2009 tour, featuring traditional works arranged by and for members of the ensemble as well as newly commissioned works, many of which utilize Asian and Western traditional instruments. Among the new works is the North American premiere of a multimedia chamber arrangement based on Layla and Majnun, a classic opera by Azerbaijani composer Uzeyir Hajibeyov. The original work, composed a century ago, is based on Arabian and Persian tales from the seventh century about ill-fated love and often is likened to Romeo and Juliet.

The performance will feature Alim Qasimov, a leading Azerbaijani singer, musician and master of the complex vocal form known as mugham, together with his daughter Fargana Qasimova, also an accomplished mugham artist.  Calligraphy renditions of the libretto and original paintings will be projected as a dynamic staging for the musical adaptation.

Aida Huseynova, a Fulbright professor at Indiana University from the Baku Music Academy, is an ethnomusicologist and has served as a consultant and research adviser to the Silk Road Project.  In 2007, Ma and Huseynova worked together to create the adaptation of Layla and Majnun at a retreat in Villecroze, France, and while at residency at Harvard University. 

Huseynova, who is traveling on the tour to interpret for the four Azerbaijani artists, calls the new piece a collaboration of the East and the West, of the past and present, and a work of collective spontaneity and creativity. 

Paths of Parables, based on Sufi parables, and composed by Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky from Uzbekistan is a storytelling piece with musical accompaniment.  Paths of Parables is the second work commissioned from Yanov-Yanovsky for the Silk Road Project.  In 2002, Yanov-Yanovsky was a Siemens Artist-in-Residence, a program launched in collaboration with the Silk Road Project, to introduce Eurasian composers to American culture and to draw inspiration from the workaday experience of U.S. industry.

Another featured work on the tour is Ritmos Anchinos by U.S. composer Gabriela Lena Frank.  Born in Berkeley, California, to a mother of mixed Peruvian/Chinese ancestry and a father of Lithuanian/Jewish descent, Frank composed the work for traditional Chinese instruments, while using tunes and tempos from Andean traditional music.  The work’s title is itself a verbal play on Spanish words that mean “Chinese” and “Andean rhythms.”   

Frank, whose life and work are emblematic of the cultural and social interplay embodied by the historic Silk Road, said the project’s educational outreach focuses on all levels, from workshops with conservatory-level students to sessions with young school students who like simply to view the instruments.

EDUCATION AND OUTREACH

During the past decade, the project has commissioned 60 new musical and multimedia works, and developed educational materials and programming for schools and music academies.

On the eve of the tour’s start March 6, the ensemble conducted a student workshop at the Rhode Island School of Design, inviting 500 middle and high school students to hear a performance by the troupe. The students were encouraged to ask questions, and received study guides from a Silk Road Project curriculum developed along with Stanford’s Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education.

Huseynova said the students were excited by the music, especially when their teachers joined the Silk Road Ensemble onstage for some on-the-spot improvisation as part of a vocal percussion piece, led by the ensemble’s lead drummer, Shane Shanahan, who studies world drumming traditions and has a background in jazz, rock and Western art music. He has traveled to Turkey, India and Tajikistan to study music.

“Lands that were once considered distant are no longer thought so,” said Ma. “We are all becoming neighbors.”