Music Opens Passages between East and West
By Ted Levin
There is a long but often underappreciated history of cultural exchange between Central Asia and the West. Ted Levin of the Silk Road Project describes how music is revitalizing this tradition and helping to break down barriers between people.
t first glance, Yo-Yo
Ma and Ganbaatar Khongorzul might seem unlikely collaborators. Ma is a
renowned classical cellist who performs at venues such as Carnegie Hall
and Lincoln Center. Khongorzul is a vocalist from Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia,
who takes huge breaths of air and produces loud melodic phrases in the
urtiin duu or "long song" style of the Gobi Desert.
In fact, however, the two musicians have a harmonious partnership. On a recent six-city U. S. concert tour, Ma and Khongorzul performed Mongolian composer Byambasuren Sharav's "Legend of Herlen," an innovative composition fusing Western and Mongolian instruments and idioms.
Sharav's piece, scored for a "long song" vocalist like Khongorzul, as well as for percussion, piano, trombones, and a two-string Mongolian horsehead fiddle called morin khuur played by Ma, is one of sixteen new works by composers from Mongolia, China, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, and Iran. The music was commissioned by the Silk Road Project, a not-for-profit organization founded in 1998 by Ma, who also serves as artistic director.
After years of performing around the world, Ma became intrigued by the migration of music across boundaries of time and culture. Starting this year, Ma hopes to use the Silk Road Project to link composers and musicians from East and West through an ambitious program of festivals. A Silk Road ensemble will travel to Central Asia for a series of concerts in the fall of 2001. The following summer, the Silk Road will be the focus of the Smithsonian Institution's annual Folklife Festival, a celebration of art, dance, and music attended by more than one million people each year.
“The Silk Road Project has helped me gain a new sense of belonging to a place—my place—at the same time that it carries my musical voice to distant cultures.”— SANGIDORJ SANSARGERELTECH, MONGOLIAN COMPOSER |
The historical Silk Road, a network of land and sea routes linking China to the Eastern Mediterranean, thrived from around 1000 BC to 1500 AD. Luxury items such as silk, as well as innovations like gunpowder and the magnetic compass gradually entered Europe from the East on the Silk Road. New varieties of instruments such as lutes and cymbals arrived as well, and this stream of technology and ideas had a profound influence on cultural development in the West.
By creating a network of arts festivals, the Silk Road Project, in cooperation with local organizers, aims to revitalize the transcultural links epitomized by the historical Silk Road. And as many governments in Central Eurasia adopt isolating, neo-nationalist cultural policies, the project can also demonstrate how performing arts exchanges can be a crucial vehicle for openness.
"I'd never thought about using Mongolian music as a resource for compositional
innovation," said Sangidorj Sansargereltech, another Mongolian composer
participating in the Silk Road Project. "I was educated at the Moscow
Conservatory and then lived and worked in Madrid. The Silk Road Project
has helped me gain a new sense of belonging to a place—my place—at
the same time that it carries my musical voice to distant cultures." 
Sharav and Sansargereltech are just two of the many musicians recommended by Open Society Institute (OSI) culture coordinators in Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Mongolia to Silk Road Project organizers who visited the region in 1999. Silk Road Project concerts will also feature performers like Iranian composer Kayhan Kalhor who plays the kemanche, a spike fiddle held upright that is a distant cousin of the cello.
In summer 2000, OSI culture coordinators arranged for composers and performers from their respective countries to travel to the Tanglewood Music Center in Lenox, Massachusetts, where the Silk Road Project's newly commissioned pieces were performed for the first time in an intensive, week-long workshop.
Tanglewood often hosts talented musicians from distant lands, but the sheer diversity of sounds, instruments, and musicians at the Silk Road performance was stunning. Students were delighted and awed as Ma and Silk Road Ensemble musicians from Iran, China, Lebanon, and Azerbaijan improvised tradition-based Silk Road fusion music.
The Silk Road Project is also using new technology to present the music and culture of Central Asia to a wider audience. In January, Ma joined website teams from OSI and the Silk Road Project in New York to discuss links between OSI's Central Eurasia Project website, eurasianet.org, and silkroadproject.org, scheduled for launch this spring. Ma sees the ancient Silk Road as the "Internet of Antiquity" and considers the web as an integral tool of contemporary cultural exchange.
Three years after its creation, the Silk Road Project is clearly making progress towards its ambitious goal of using music to bring cultures and people together. "By listening to and learning from the voices of an authentic musical tradition, we become increasingly able to advocate for the worlds they represent," said Ma. "As we interact with unfamiliar musical traditions, we encounter voices that are not exclusive to one community. We discover voices that belong to one world."
Ted Levin is executive director of the Silk Road Project.
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