Ma's musical caravan stops in Taipei

In recent years, Yo-yo Ma (馬友友) has had a tendency to push chamber music out of its chambers and into a more global context. Though he is the world's top selling classical musician, he has lately taken his two 18th-century cellos in search of something more regional than Bach or Saint-Saens, finding new resonance in forms like the folk music of Appalachia and the traditions of the Gobi desert. He has also entered more popular arenas, most notably with his contribution to the soundtrack of Lee Ang's (李安), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (臥虎藏龍).

Ma's recent wanderings have culminated in the Silk Road Project, which he will bring to Taipei's National Theater and National Concert Hall for two sold-out performances Tuesday and Wednesday. The performances will be Taiwan's only chance to catch Ma in one of his greatest projects to date, an exploration of music in the context of the history and cultures of the Silk Road.

The Silk Road Project was first founded in 1998 as a non-profit organization by Ma along with a team of scholars, musicians, artists and educators. Using the Silk Road as a sort of muse, the Silk Road Project set out to explore how the commerce of that trade route extended to music, and how that music spreads across and transcends East and West and past and present. Ma once wryly observed, "the Silk Road was the Internet of antiquity."

With backers ranging from the Ford Motor Company to the Aga Kahn Trust for Culture, the Silk Road Project has already begun to produce not only performances, but also educational programs, workshops, recordings and documentaries. Contemporary composers from Tajikistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Mongolia and China have been commissioned to write music for the project.

Performances will also explore the works of Western composers like Ravel, Debussy and Rimski-Korsakov, all of whom were inspired by the ancient Orient.

Ma's journey began last summer with a performance at the Daibutsu (Big Buddha) Temple in Nara, Japan, a spot considered the easternmost point of the Silk Road. So far, the tour has also completed a warm-up engagement at last July's Tanglewood Music Center in Lenox, Massachusetts, and several other performances in the US.

The synthesis of different regional styles has followed Ma and his troop all the way. In a Jan. 22 performance at Dartmouth University, for the first time on stage, Ma put aside his cello for the marin khuur, a Mongolian fiddle. In addition to piano and symphonic accompaniment, other Asian instruments featured that night included tablas, pipa and sheng.

Ma's visit to Taipei comes as part of the Asian leg of his tour, and will be preceded by performances in Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai. Though Ma has played in Taipei each of the last three years, the Silk Road Project will mark the first time he has ever taken a performance to both sides of the Taiwan Strait. As recently as 1998, Ma was banned from entering China, a situation since resolved with the help of powerful friends, including Bill Clinton and the head of Sony Music.

Ma was born in Paris in 1955, the son of two Chinese immigrants. His father had been a violinist and professor at Nanjing University and his mother a singer from Hong Kong. A child prodigy, as early as the age of five he was performing Bach. When he was seven his family moved again, this time to the US, where his education continued at the Julliard School and Harvard University.