MUSIC: Yo-Yo Ma's Edge Effect
By JOHANNA KELLER

Whether he's playing chamber music with Condoleezza Rice at Constitution Hall, testifying to Congress about the difficulties in obtaining visas for visiting international artists, serenading Prince Charles and Camilla at the White House, accepting an appointment as a U.N. peace envoy, or providing the musical moment for the first anniversary of 9/11 at ground zero, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma is arguably today's most widely recognized classical musician. He's become the got-to-get guy for the wow event.

In between the high-profile happenings, Ma goes about the business of his musical career, making the rounds of the best orchestras and top international festivals, and recording new albums for Sony. By and large, though, his creative energy has been directed toward the Silk Road Project that he conceived a decade ago.

A sprawling enterprise with high ideals, the Silk Road Project could be described as a musicians' collective, new-music commissioning venture, recording ensemble, touring group, educational organization, or all of the above. In the past 10 years, it has produced hundreds of performances and educational events, three recordings (with more on the way), and two dozen commissioned works by composers from countries including Azerbaijan, China, Iran, Mongolia, Turkey, and Uzbekistan. Last summer the organization launched Silk Road Chicago, its first citywide collaboration, encompassing scores of performances in collaboration with over 70 Chicago cultural and educational organizations, taking place over a year. This spring, Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble will perform a series of concerts at the Art Institute of Chicago and in collaboration with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, in addition to performances in Seattle and at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

The project's governing metaphor and philosophical touchstone is the Silk Road, which Ma calls "the Internet of antiquity." The routes that led from the Pacific through the Middle East to the Mediterranean Sea from 2000 BC to around 1500 AD carried trade in technology, culture, and ideas. In addition to silk, they brought to new populations gunpowder, the magnetic compass, the printing press, glassmaking techniques, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, and musical instruments of all kinds.

The organization's mission is to perform, commission, and disseminate a variety of music from the cultures touched by the Silk Road. Given the current state of the Middle East and newly explosive issues of competing cultural and political hierarchies, the Silk Road has turned out to be a timely topic - Ma was visionary to have seen its possibilities in the mid-1990s. For Ma, who showed an early bent for confounding expectations by following up his pre-college Juilliard School music training with a degree in humanities at Harvard, the Silk Road Project has become a bully pulpit for ideas about aesthetics, philosophy, globalization, business practice, management, cultural diversity and - it's hardly overstating the case to say - the meaning of life.

From the career perspective, Ma has done it all. He is one of the handful of virtuoso musicians who can call his own shots and one of the rare Midas-touch classical-recording artists, with over 50 titles on his label, Sony, and 15 Grammys. Last year he received a $1-million Dan David Prize for his work on the Silk Road. Virtually every performance sells out. He garners fees that can top $75,000 a night. (Concert fees are notoriously confidential. That figure came from a concert presenter who asked not to be named, but who added that, like many celebrity musicians, Ma plays sometimes for more and often for less. It should be noted, too, that, like many celebrity performers, he donates many charity performances.)

To a broad public, Ma has come to represent classical music itself. To understand his status as an icon of his art form, try thinking of another figure with this kind of artistic status who is emblematic of a field while transcending its limitations. The closest analogy might be Wynton Marsalis, who (for better or worse) has come to represent the current American jazz scene.

The parallels between them are striking and instructive. Marsalis and Ma are both in middle age - Marsalis is 45, Ma is 51. Both are virtuoso players on their instruments and attractive, crowd-pleasing, media-savvy performers who hit superstardom well before age 30. Both have transcended the limits of being a performing artist by founding institutions through which they have broadened their appeal. And both are exerting a marked aesthetic influence on the music of their times - but in almost diametrically opposite ways.

As has been widely reported, Marsalis has come under frequent fire from critics in the highly politicized jazz world for using his power as head of Jazz at Lincoln Center to define jazz as limited to the conservative music he himself performs. This narrow-spectrum view suffused the hotly debated 2001 PBS documentary Jazz, by Ken Burns, for which Marsalis was senior creative consultant.

In contrast, Ma's aesthetic direction is expansive. Rather than confine himself to the cello repertoire of solo, chamber, and orchestral works, Ma has sought to enlarge his musical sphere and satisfy a seemingly insatiable artistic curiosity. To satisfy his longtime passion for the medium of film, he has recorded for feature scores (among them, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Memoirs of a Geisha) as well as albums of music by John Williams and Ennio Morricone. And in his most artistically significant film project, he used the medium to reinterpret the monumental masterworks of the cello repertoire - the six Bach cello suites - in a 1997 Emmy Award-winning series shown on PBS. These video collaborations with artists such as the Kabuki actor Tamasaburo Bando, the garden designer Julie Moir Messervy, and the choreographer Mark Morris were a dramatic demonstration of Ma's nonpurist approach to music and his synergistic approach to art.

Ma has a keen appetite for music of all genres and collaboration of all kinds, having performed with Appalachian fiddlers, Kalahari bush musicians, and the uncategorizable Bobby McFerrin. Ma won his 15th Grammy for Obrigado Brazil, an album including bossa nova and samba with Paquito D'Rivera, the sibling guitarists Sérgio and Odair Assad, Egberto Gismonti, and Cesar Camargo Mariano. But Ma's biggest venture to date - and his near-obsession for the past decade - has been the Silk Road Project.

"The strongest impulse of my life is to understand," Ma said in a lengthy telephone conversation that ranged over a variety of topics, including Viktor E. Frankl, the aesthetics of Chinese calligraphy, and the music of Italian cinema. For Ma, the Silk Road is the fulcrum of his intellectual quest to create a unified understanding of a complex cultural landscape. "All of this activity is about creating meaning. All my life I have wanted to understand. And understanding has consequences."

While the Silk Road Project has received its fair share of press, commentary has largely focused on its multi-culti trendiness or the ethnic instruments and sounds. The broader aesthetic influence has not been much discussed, but in fact the Silk Road represents an important reformulation of classical music's pomerium. Ultimately Ma's project is a subtle change agent that exerts a significant influence on the scope, and therefore direction, of classical music.

It could be said that, like several other art forms, classical music has been looking for its next "ism." Over the past century, the dominant musical aesthetic has been expressed in a succession of reductive terms like Post-Romanticism, Modernism, Atonalism, Nationalism, Neo-Classicism, Neo-Romanti- cism, Minimalism, and Postmodernism (to name a few). Out of the cacophony of sounds that make up the music of any moment, it is a challenge to select the significant from the trendy.

Recently a pattern has emerged. Some of the most engaging music written in the past decade appears to share a common aesthetic. To put it simply, this new music incorporates musical idioms, structures, instruments, and traditions from anywhere on earth, from any culture, to an extent not heard before. We are not talking about Madama Butterfly spiced with pentatonic scales. Nor William Bolcom's music, which, despite groundbreaking incorporation of vernacular languages such as salsa or jazz, for instance, remains rooted in the tradition of Western concert music.

This new music posits Western and non-Western styles, as well as classical and vernacular traditions, on equal or near-equal footing. It mixes popular and folk music with Eastern and Western art-music structures, tonal or atonal. This music appeals to younger audiences whose iPods are loaded with an astonishing variety of sounds from past centuries or from any spot on the planet.

Among the better known of these neoglobal composers are Richard Danielpour, Osvaldo Golijov, Mark O'Connor, Tan Dun, Zhang Xu Ru, and Evan Ziporyn. Along with them are artists particularly known for cross-discipline performances, for melding East with West, and vernacular with classical traditions. Those include the pianist Ethan Iverson, the bassist Edgar Meyer, the choreographer Mark Morris, and the pipa player Wu Man. All of these composers and artists have been involved in some way with Ma's Silk Road Project.

"Whatever we might think the present is," Ma said, "it has come from deep interconnections among people. This continuum, as a historical view, is a metaphor. In the life of creativity and invention, purity doesn't really exist. That is Appiah's view of cosmopolitanism."

Ma is referring to Kwame Anthony Appiah's widely discussed book, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, published last year by W.W. Norton. Appiah's thesis challenges the multi-culti status quo of liberal thought and pushes it a step forward. Rather than holding that pure unadulterated ethnic culture should be preserved, Appiah argues for fluidity, writing that "a world in which communities are neatly hived off from one another seems no longer a serious option, if it ever was one."

Appiah questions the assumption of cultural authenticity. "How far back must one go?" he writes, and points out that the traditional West African cloth evolved from Javanese batiks often milled by the Dutch, and, similarly, that the traditional clothing of Herero women was influenced by 19th-century German missionaries.

His point is that there is no pure culture.

Translate that idea into musical terms, and you might get "Five Finnish Folk Songs," selections of which are on the album Silk Road Journeys: When Strangers Meet, in which the Japanese composer Michio Mamiya incorporates traditional narrative chants from the Saami (or Lapps) of Finland, set to cello and piano. The mixing and matching can make you dizzy.

One of Ma's favorite examples of this kind of cross-fertilization is the tango, which had its origins in drumming patterns played by African slaves in Argentina and whose primary instrument, the bandoneón, was invented in Germany and carried by Italian musicians to South America. Looked at through the lens of cosmopolitanism, the question of what is authentic no longer pertains. Perhaps it never did.

"People have been talking globalization - some for and some against," Ma points out. "But when you look back through world history, there have been many instances of increasing globalization - it's inevitable, and continuous. Now it is simply moving more swiftly."

When Ma first conceived the Silk Road Project, around 1996, it met with some skepticism from critics who viewed it as a temporary pet project, classical music's version of "It's a Small World After All." With a few exceptions, world music has a small fan base and is considered a hard sell. Booking agents bought the show because it included Ma, and they knew audiences would turn out to hear the star cellist. But they had doubts about the box-office potential for ensembles composed of musicians with unpronounceable names who played similarly unpronounceable instruments. The oft-asked question at the time was why someone with the celebrity profile of Yo-Yo Ma would go to such effort to perform with completely unknown performers from Japan and Azerbaijan and India who play ethnic instruments that even sophisticated music critics have to look up in Grove.

Ma made no secret of the fact that one motivation for founding the Silk Road Project was artistic reinvigoration. Analytical, self-aware, and intellectually ambitious, Ma has governed his career wisely. The classical-music world can become a golden trap. Music stars, having mastered their instruments and core repertoire, secured recording contracts, and built an audience, can go on to lead lives in a closed circuit of glamorous orchestras, festivals, and recording studios. Night after night, year after year, they are called on to repeat their rendition of the standard works popular with the conservative subscription audiences. They burn out.

Ma has avoided that by constantly challenging himself artistically and intellectually. "If you're bored," he said, "then it is you who are boring because you've set yourself a certain narrow frame and you wallow in it."

While Ma named no names, he agreed that a number of virtuosos had burned out. Pinchas Zukerman, about a decade older than Ma, had been an extraordinarily promising violinist who arrived in Manhattan from Israel in his teens, but began to autopilot performances as fame overtook him. These days Zukerman has a new lease on life through conducting and performing more chamber music. Burnout might have overtaken the violinist Isaac Stern, but in midlife, he immersed himself in saving Carnegie Hall, as well as becoming a force on 57th Street, the center of the classical-music industry, where he spent the last decades of his life as the industry macher and talent spotter. One of Stern's finds was Zukerman. Another was Yo-Yo Ma.

Ma was born in Paris to Chinese parents. Musical child prodigies often display their talents on stringed instruments, which demand a sophisticated sense of pitch and are notoriously difficult to master on a purely physical level. Ma's first cello teacher was his father, who assigned him the task of memorizing two measures of a Bach suite each day until he knew the entire work. Significantly, Ma's father was a composer and held a Ph.D. in musicology; his dissertation had been on the fusion of musical styles, so in the home, many different kinds of music were heard and performed.

As a young prodigy, Ma proved to be naturally musical, competitive, focused, and eager to perform. He came to the United States under the patronage of Isaac Stern and enrolled in the Juilliard School. Many prodigies have had all those attributes and connections and yet flamed out around their late teens or early 20s. All too often, unless they rebel in some important artistic fashion and seize their own artistic adult persona, the performances become stilted and eventually their careers fizzle out. For Ma, he has often said, his transitional moment came during adolescence in a performance at the Marlboro Festival when he suddenly found his musical freedom and became conscious of himself as an individual artist. After that, he began to assert himself against the domination of his tradition-bound father. Those events catapulted him into adulthood in the psychological, as well as the artistic, sense.

Ma entered his 20s with much of the core Classical and Romantic concertos and recital literature already in his fingers, along with a quantity of chamber music, and a growing reputation among music insiders. There was an excited industry buzz around him in the very early 80s. At 23, he married Jill Hornor, a scholar in German he met at a summer music festival when he was 16. He was diagnosed with scoliosis, a curvature of the spine, and took off half a season of performing to have it corrected by surgery. At the time, neither Ma nor his management talked about the operation, though it was an open secret in the industry. Undoubtedly they feared that the press might focus on this health issue, and that any musical misstep on his part might be attributed to physical weakness.

I first met him around that time, in August 1982. We were both in our mid-20s. Ma was rehearsing in a church in Wellfleet on Cape Cod for a chamber-music festival where I was working. After the rehearsal he bounded down the stairs with his cello, and I introduced myself. We chatted for a few minutes, and I asked him about his scoliosis, adding that I was particularly interested because I had the condition myself. His reaction was - I have come to realize - typical of his personality.

"I can see from the way you're dressed," he said sympathetically, eyeing the voluminous blouse that hid the asymmetry of my frame. "I used to wear loose shirts too. Hey, do you want to see my scar?"

Not waiting for an answer, he pulled up his T-shirt and turned his back to me so I could admire the still slightly pink scar that ran the length of his spine. It was an impulsive gesture, generous and charming. It was an act toward a stranger that put us instantly on equal footing in a shared moment of vulnerability. And - as I have come to know from hearsay over the following years - it displayed the kind of impulsive exuberance characteristic of Ma.

He offered to put me in touch with his sister, Yeou-Cheng Ma, a doctor who knew surgeons (the one she recommended in New York operated successfully on me the following year). I didn't maintain personal contact with Ma after that encounter, although over the years I ran into him from time to time. In our most recent phone conversation, when I mentioned our first meeting, he said he remembered the incident from 25 years ago. Somewhat dubious, I asked one of his assistants about this. "I don't doubt it," she said. " It amazes us constantly that, as busy as he is, he seems able to remember everything."

Busy doesn't begin to describe the level of Ma's engagement with the Silk Road Project, involving more than 60 musicians. When asked just how many performances the Silk Road did each year, one staff member said, given the many educational programs, it was "impossible to count." There are performance tours, workshops, symposia, talks with faculty members at the participating universities, and sessions of reading through new compositions by young composers. And, while not every event involves Ma, he appears to
take an active hand in each aspect of the operation. Like his tireless mentor Isaac Stern, Ma is an avid talent spotter. In addition, Ma takes obvious pleasure - make that unalloyed glee - in collaborative creative work. In fact, his name, Yo, means friendship in Chinese. Ma has often joked that his parents couldn't think of another name to give him, so they simply doubled it. The Silk Road Project has given him boundless opportunities to fulfill his impulse to collect around him talented people.

"The trick is to ask people to get involved who are connected in their own areas," Ma said, "so then the circle expands to their friends, too. People involved in this group are very generous. Each knows something deeply, is fabulous at one thing and really curious. There is a sense of shared values, the most important of which is that we start from the premise that no one knows everything."

Sounding like a business-management guru, Ma takes great delight in recounting anecdotes that usually revolve around how expectations are confounded when musicians from different cultures with entirely different musical experiences are brought together. He tells the story of the tabla player Sandeep Das, who was rehearsing a long Persian composition with an ensemble. After the first run-through, one musician suggested that they run it again "from Measure 156." To the amazement of the Western-trained musicians in the ensemble, Das replied that he didn't read music, but that if they played it through a second time, he would know the entire piece by heart.

Ma also points out that often it is the smallest detail that can frustrate cross-cultural communication and collaboration. He tells a story about the composer Tan Dun, recording in a remote area of western China. One of the percussion virtuosos of that region was asked to put on a set of headphones during a recording session, but the experience of playing with his ears covered was so disconcerting that he simply couldn't function.

"The ethos we have is one of kindness and respect and never setting up people to fail," Ma explained. "It can be scary to enter another area, to go from improvising music to music on the page."

To keep up with his creative activities, Ma has assembled an able supporting cast. The Ma empire encompasses a business office in his hometown of Boston and a general manager in Westchester, N.Y., who acts as the switchboard operator in charge of scheduling and travel. His management firm, International Creative Management, in New York City, books his engagements, and Sony Records does his recordings and a great deal of his publicity. The Silk Road office, with a small staff, is in Rhode Island and, since 2004, has been overseen by an executive director, Laura Freid.

Freid most recently served as executive vice president for public affairs and university relations at Brown University, and had held administrative posts at Harvard and Boston Universities. While the Silk Road Project had an academic flavor from its inception, Freid institutionalized that aspect by advocating for a formal alliance with an educational institution, and
shortly after her arrival, she began talks with a number of universities. The organization chose to ally with Harvard - in part because it was Ma's alma mater and also because of its excellent research resources. Silk Road also established ties with the Rhode Island School of Design because of its strength in the visual arts and its potential as a laboratory for multimedia work.

Now that the Silk Road is a decade old, the organization is undergoing an internal assessment. At a retreat last winter, Silk Road board members discussed what other organizations might have an analogous structure: Mark Morris Dance Group and Itzhak Perlman's Hamptons Summer Music School on Long Island were proposed as the closest models. The Kronos Quartet, which was a pioneer in self-management, could also have been considered. But the board members found it impossible to find an exact analogy for how Silk Road functions.

"We're no longer nascent," Freid said. "We are moving to the next level of organization." Engaged in Silk Road's first formal strategic plan, Freid observed that "strategy means what we are not doing."

Another key staff member in the world of Ma is Catherine Gevers, who serves on the Silk Road Project Board of Directors, but also, more important, functions as the sounding board and reality tester for his big ideas. Gevers told me that for about the past 15 years, Ma has begun to apply business models and philosophies to his creative thinking, as he has sought to find larger vehicles to express his ideas. The two met one summer at the Marlboro Festival when he was in his 20s. Over decades, a close personal and professional relationship developed while Gevers worked in previous jobs at Columbia Artists Management and then at Carnegie Hall.

"Trust is essential to Yo-Yo, essential to creativity and to music making," Gevers said. "The job I have is being the first line of interrogation when a new idea comes up. The only job description is that I be honest and critical and supportive."

By all accounts, including his own, Ma is not very good at prioritizing. That generous and charming impulsiveness I saw when I first met him translates directly into his professional life. He has seemingly limitless energy and unending ideas. "Like most creative people, he doesn't have a concept of time and space," said one administrator who has worked with him. "And a lot of us spend time trying to figure out what's on top of the list - meanwhile the ideas accumulate."

Many musicians who attempt simultaneous careers eventually pay a price in their music. Not so, seemingly, with Ma. The Silk Road has improved his already astonishing playing. In the early 1990s, he went through a phase of overly enthusiastic performances, during which his facial expressions and swaying body became mannered and distracting. The playing was punchy and obvious, almost Technicolor. Since he founded the Silk Road however, the performances I have heard - live and on recordings - have become more internalized. While his playing has always been clean, consistent, and communicative, recently he has brought greater attention to the sweep and breath inherent in a melodic line, no matter how simple or complex. His immersion in ethnic music has changed his ear and his musicianship.

When asked about that, he said he was aware of the changethat after playing Brazilian music, for instance, his impression is that he plays Haydn "more slowly." While Ma may experience his own playing as slower, the effect on this listener is not a change of tempo but a heightened awareness of the subtlety of the monodic line, of melody itself.

Ma has pushed himself to explore different instruments, such as the Mongolian morin khuur (also known as the horsehead fiddle because of the shape of its scroll). He sought out the double bassist Edgar Meyer and the violinist Mark O'Connor and asked them to teach him to play jazz. Over a series of months, they held rehearsals together during which Ma said he learned to play with less vibrato and rubato, habits ingrained by his classical training. The result of these encounters has been an expansion of his musical idioms and ideas.

"In ecology this creates what you term the 'edge effect,'" Ma explained, "when two ecosystems meet and you have the least density but the greatest variety. This pertains to culture exactly, whether we are talking about Brooklyn or Paris, Istanbul or Xi'an." Ma might have been talking about himself when he mused: "Why do so many immigrant populations do so well in the invention field? Because they are on the edge, part of this edge effect."

Out of the culturally diverse edges of Ma's life experience, he has invented a new kind of performing-arts organization that synthesizes a cosmopolitan aesthetic, an entrepreneurial and collaborative business approach, and an educational mission. It has served him well. By founding the Silk Road Project, he has advanced the boundaries of his musicianship, reinvigorated his playing, and provided himself with a constant flow of new ideas and new artistic collaborations that stimulate and enrich his creativity - his personal Silk Road.

(Johanna Keller directs the Goldring Arts Journalism Program and teaches journalism at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. She is the former editor of Chamber Music magazine, and her essays on culture have appeared in The New York Times, the London Evening Standard, and the Los Angeles Times.)

Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 53, Issue 29, Page B10