Maria Connors

Music is often listened to as a product of a certain time and place, particular to a given culture and set of practices. While traditions have been carried across cultures, borrowed in celebration or stolen without recognition, the globalization of music is a tenuous path. Confidently breaking down barriers in this field is Yo-Yo Ma and the Silkroad Ensemble, a cross-cultural musical group that combines contemporary and ancient sounds to create an auditory experience that speaks to the power of connection and understanding found through music and collaboration. On September 24th, Worcester residents will have the opportunity to see the Silkroad Ensemble in action during a community jam session hosted by Worcester PopUp. 

Founded by cellist Yo-Yo Ma in 2000, the Silkroad Ensemble is a Grammy-award winning group that has spent 19 years advancing global understanding and promoting cross-cultural collaboration. Made up of artists from countries such as Japan, Syria, the United States, and Ireland, the Silkroad Ensemble seeks to draw on cultural knowledge and traditions to bring together various flavors of world music.

The ensemble features many instruments unique to certain countries – new member Maeve Gilchrist plays the Celtic harp while Kaoru Watanabe is a master of the Japanese shinobue flutes and taiko drums. If you never expected to hear about either of those instruments, never mind hear them played live, now might just be your chance!

The ensemble’s name originates from Yo-Yo Ma’s fascination with the history of the Silk Road, a network of trade routes that connected much of East Asia and Southeast Asia with South Asia, Persia, the Arabian Peninsula, East Africa and Southern Europe. He saw it as a metaphor for creative collaboration and a global exchange of knowledge, inspiring the creation of a musical group based on these values. He formed the group at Tanglewood Music Center and for many years served as the Artistic Director, curating a diverse collection of artists that draw on musical traditions from all around the world. 

The Silkroad Ensemble is currently in residence at The College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, as part of a program known as Arts Transcending Borders (ATB). Yonca Karakilic, Director of ATB, describes the weeklong residency as including “performances, workshops, class visits and community engagement activities such as the jam session”, referring to the event hosted at Worcester PopUp.  Karakilic describes the jam session as less of a showcase of technical mastery and more like “watching a conversation unfold before your eyes that you know you won’t ever hear elsewhere again”. 

Percussionist Shane Shanahan, Silkroad’s Co-Artistic Director and the lead teaching artist of the Holy Cross residency, leads the session with an ear for weaving together musical traditions. Karakilic likens him to a facilitator “speaking dialogue between seemingly impossible partners.” The first community jam session intended to draw upon the city’s relationship immigrant and refugee populations and was hosted in partnership with the Refugee Artisans of Worcester. The language barriers between parties did not inhibit any musician or audience member from experiencing a deep sense of connection to the music and to each other. After the success of the first jam session, Silkroad decided to open participation in their jam sessions to “community artists of diverse traditions”. Karakilic excitedly describes the variety of artists they’ve had show up: “We’ve had a drum teacher arrive with his entire drum circle students, guitarists, and Celtic bluegrass enthusiasts.” The diversity celebrated in the Silkroad Ensemble encourages artists from a range of backgrounds to flock towards these jam sessions, giving them a platform to collaborate with and learn from other talented musicians. 

The Silkroad Ensemble is unique not only in their diversity, but as a group that is actively engaged in the world. Yo-Yo Ma calls members “Citizen Artists”, meaning they are “socially engaged, active in school settings and seeking to use their artistry to help affect change in the world.” The musicians of the collective are not only members of Silkroad; they have “multifaceted artistic lives outside of Silkroad” that contribute to the ensemble’s “collective quality”. 

Each year, The Silkroad Ensemble’s partnership with ATB is organized around annual themes that help ground their work and move the artistry in a particular direction. This year’s theme is “Originality and its Origins”, and Karalic along with the rest of Silkroad wait eagerly to see what this direction inspires. Various Silkroad artists and staff members spend time brainstorming how to approach the theme from multiple perspectives through presentations, performances and activities that involve participants in an enriching, interdisciplinary artistic experience. 

The Music of Strangers is a new documentary made by filmmaker Morgan Neville, chronicling the origins of Silkroad and the stories of many of its core members. This film provides insight into the sheer joy and unbridled excitement from some of the ensemble’s first meetings, showing how a group of unlikely collaborators has grown into a Grammy Award-winning musical ensemble. Creativity can be found in unlikely places, and exists for the people, and by the people – The Silkroad Ensemble is living proof that artistry knows no language barriers, and thrives off of unfamiliar traditions becoming familiar.