Yo-Yo Ma (b. 1955)
YO-YO MA HITS THE ROAD The Cellist Talks About the Silk Road Project
From Appalachian Journey to Soul of the Tango to his two Simply Baroque albums, Yo-Yo Ma is all over the musical map. And the intrepid cellist continues to branch out. He is currently directing the Silk Road Project, a cross-cultural investigation that brings together musicians from along the great trade route that once stretched from China and Japan across Asia to Greece and Italy. Solo, Ma's acclaimed 1999 recital album, was the first recorded byproduct of this bold venture; the soundtrack to Ang Lee's acclaimed action film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, composed by Tan Dun, is the second. Ma gave the details to Barnes & Noble.com's Andrew Farach-Colton.
Barnes & Noble.com: What is the Silk Road Project about?
Yo-Yo Ma: It's about locating and sustaining incredibly talented people who work in traditions -- whether they're Persian, Arabic, or Balinese -- to see whether through workshops we can find ways of working together, and to keep those traditions alive in our cultural currency without ghettoizing them. It's not just "Let's go hear some exotic music!" I look at classical composers like Debussy and Ravel who went to the 1899 Paris Expo, where they first saw Balinese dancers and heard the gamelan. That changed their lives, or at least gave them new directions and possibilities. And I look at how Ang Lee has contemporized ancient martial arts forms in such an amazing way in his film.
We spent the last two years commissioning people from Mongolia, China, Azerbaijan, and Tajikistan to write pieces and found musicians to play them. Seventy of us gathered at Tanglewood this summer, including three Iranians, a bunch of Mongolians, plus people from Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. We worked together for 12 days and heard some amazing music, both newly composed as well as traditional, and we all learned an unbelievable amount from each other.
B&N.com: It sounds like a musical United Nations conference.
YM: Yes, but in a very specific way. We're not trying to change the world: We're trying to create expressive links that come from people's curiosity and willingness to work things through. That's always hard because of language, cultural, political, and religious barriers. But when you actually get to one of those links, I think they're lasting and can go on to create an internal network system. That's what we're trying to do.
B&N.com: There's been a lot of interest generated in the project. Last year, when you participated in a live chat on Barnes & Noble.com, we were bombarded with questions about the Silk Road Project from people wanting to get involved -- and an unusual number of those questions came from Japan.
YM: Japan prides itself as being the end of the Silk Road because so many things arrived there, and because it was fairly peaceful for many years, a lot of traditions and objects actually survived, including Gagaku from Korea, fire rituals from Kazakhstan, and instruments like the biwa from China and East African stones. Japan ended up becoming a cultural repository for many things that were lost in other places because of warfare and destruction.
B&N.com: The soundtrack for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is part of the project. What are the differences between recording a classical album and a film soundtrack?
YM: There's a bigger team, in terms of the numbers of people involved working on the soundtrack, but in other ways it's similar in that music, image, and everything serves a single purpose: the central idea of the film. In a way it's like a giant chamber thing. The difference is that you're not necessarily aware of all the parts involved. You have to put your trust in the director and the composer who do know more of what's involved. If they're there -- and in this case they were -- it makes a huge difference because they know exactly what they need.
B&N.com: So you worked directly with Tan Dun, the composer, and Ang Lee, the director?
YM: I got the music from Tan Dun, and I was very fortunate that I knew him and his music from before. Otherwise I would have been recording in a vacuum, as the orchestral part was recorded after mine. From his melodic shapes and from talking to him, I knew where he was going. You have to take an imaginative leap into the world of the film, and it was helpful to have a videotape so I could see it, and to have Ang Lee there so I could talk about it with him. They both helped to set me in the right direction.
B&N.com: Solo -- your recital program of music by Mark O'Connor, Zoltán Kodály, Bright Sheng, David Wilde, and Alexander Tcherepnin -- was the first recording of the project. Where does it fit in?
YM: It's a sense of how one might look at world music from a classical point of view. There's the idea that things have traveled widely: Kodály worked very closely at the turn of the last century to look at root traditions in and around Hungary; O'Connor represents a centuries-old oral tradition of fiddling that traveled from Europe to America; and Bright Sheng lived in a province just east of Tibet, was exposed to many different types of ethnic music, and then took these with him to the United States.
B&N.com: Do you have plans yet for a third Silk Road recording?
YM: We're going to continue to locate talent, commission music, and try and put together some recordings. Obviously, that's in the future, but we're working with some very talented people and hopefully good things will come out of it.
November 9, 2000
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