Yo-Yo Ma is probably the most recognizable classical musician in the United States. He's everywhere: serenading the president at the White House, smiling at latte customers from the CD rack at Starbucks, and playing 80 concert dates a year, including Tuesday night's appearance at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Call him the face of classical music in America, though, and the Parisian-born, New York-raised cellist responds with a meandering story that makes him sound more like a Buddhist-leaning scoutmaster than a revered musician.
"I believe very much in guides," Ma said. "What makes something interesting is when a world opens up to someone, and usually there's a guide that takes them in to show them the wonders and beauties."
He gave an example: the FIFA World Cup-winning Spanish football team. "These guys are making soccer incredibly interesting," he said. "But if you asked me to tell someone about soccer, they would fall asleep. You have to find the right guide."
So if Ma has become America's de facto "guide" to classical music, he's OK with that. But he's not going to come out and say it. He'll just continue to play Beethoven on the "Today" show. And if that makes Americans want to listen to more Beethoven, great.
"We need role models and buddies so we can continue to appreciate what the world and being alive has to offer," he said. "If I am a guide to someone, well, a performer sometimes takes on this role, saying, 'I love this. I'm an advocate of this, and I am going to show you how this music can come alive.'"
The music Ma is advocating on this return trip to the Triangle, however, is not classical - not in a conventional sense. Instead, Ma's Silk Road Ensemble will make its North Carolina debut.
Although a side project, the ensemble has consumed much of Ma's creative energy over the past 10 years. From its inception, the Silk Road Ensemble has been dedicated to playing music from, and inspired by, the wide swath of lands stretching from China to the Mediterranean.
For centuries, the Silk Road served as a conduit for spices, cloth and other-worldly mystique. Modern transportation may have made camel caravans obsolete, but Ma and his fellow musicians in the Silk Road Ensemble believe there's great value in continuing to connect East and West through music.
"None of us in the ensemble have any pretentions of saying we are the world's experts on the music from this part of the world, in the same way that I am not an expert about Beethoven," Ma said. "But it's not about being an expert, but about trying your best to locate people who know things and can try to make things incredibly exciting."
On the 10-city U.S. tour, Ma will travel with 14 other Silk Road musicians, but the official roster includes 40 people from more than 20 countries. When it was formed in 1998, the ensemble was simply Ma and a handful of friends, all interested in world music, who got together one summer in western Massachusetts.
"We didn't have two nickels to rub together," Ma said. But they managed to commission work from 16 composers, mostly hailing from the "stan" countries and Mongolia. Then came the recruiting mission. Pre-Craigslist, how did he find people who played the Mongolian urtiin duu? The Galacian bagpipe? The Japanese shakuhachi?
"We put it out to friends, and friends called friends, and that's how it happened," Ma said. "We have never held an audition."
Musical gumbo
The Silk Road Ensemble now has five albums, and the set list for this August tour reads like a retrospective appropriate for a decade-old ensemble. From the latest release, 2009's "Off the Map," the ensemble will perform Osvaldo Golijov's "Air to Air," a world symphony that blends music of Sardinian folk songs and Easter services from the Mexican Catholic and Arab Christian traditions. From "New Impossibilities," a 2007 collaboration with the Chicago Symphony, there's "Shristi," a virtuosic dialogue for Indian tabla and other percussion instruments, and "Ambush from Ten Sides," a traditional Chinese piece arranged for pipa, sheng, guitar and cello.
The concert will also include an as-yet-unrecorded 2008 commission and selections from the ensemble's 2002 Smithsonian Folkways album.
Deciding which works to play, rearrange and commission is a process run by committee. "This has become a collective," Ma said. "We come together to explore things that we are interested in. We want to create things; we want to share things. We bring our experiences to the table, and we work it out."
Showcasing other talents
Although Ma is often the drawing card for Silk Road shows, he's rarely featured in solos. His back-row status in the ensemble sometimes surprises concertgoers. On his last two trips to the Triangle, Ma was gala soloist to open the N.C. Symphony's 2008 season and returned a few months later with his "Yo-Yo Ma and Friends" tour.
The Silk Road Ensemble offers a different concert experience, yet even with ticket prices starting at $95, the UNC-CH show has sold out. As of press time, more than 100 people were on the waiting list, hoping for turnbacks.
The lucky 1,400 people holding tickets should come prepared to hear music unlike anything they've heard live, trusting Ma to serve as a guide.
Ma will be a familiar face, sitting in the back row, smiling.
"What we can promise is that we always have a great time onstage," Ma said. "It takes so many people and resources to bring us together that we treasure every minute onstage. Everything we do is fresh. It's exciting to us, the latest of what we think we can do as a group, as a band and as a collective."
