The Silk Road Project: Yo-Yo Ma's festival of music and events is rooted in 3,000 years of Eurasian culture

The term "Silk Road" is a wonderfully romantic one, conjuring up ancient trade routes with camels bearing brocades and spices and exotic goods along paths once trodden by the likes of Marco Polo.

Nowadays, the musical project that bears that romantic title is more concerned with the cross-currents of performance styles, instruments and music from the countries that have crisscrossed Eurasia ever since the first millennium B.C. From such countries as Iran, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Mongolia, Korea, Japan and China, Silk Road Project artistic director Yo-Yo Ma has assembled the musicians who will play with American percussionists, pianists and keyboard players in an intensive week of Seattle Symphony-sponsored concerts that begin next Sunday.

The five main concerts, presented at 7:30 p.m. nightly through May 16 in Benaroya Hall, will be accompanied by a host of cultural and educational events, from a public-lecture series and textile exhibit at the Henry Art Gallery to a virtual exhibit online at www.seattleartmuseum.org/silkroad, hosted by the Seattle Art Museum, and a spectacular array of Seattle Symphony learning experiences (from pre-concert adult lectures to educational sessions in the family learning center, Soundbridge, at Benaroya).

For more information and a general Silk Road sensory overload, visit three more informative Web sites: the main Silk Road Web site at www.silkroadproject.org, the Seattle Symphony's at www.seattlesymphony.org, and the UW's at www.uwch.org/silkroad.

Another great audio resource: the Sony Classical disc, "Silk Road Journeys," which has a lot of the artists and repertoire we'll hear in Seattle.

Where did the original silk routes travel? From China through the Central Asian deserts, across the Iranian plateau, and on to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, in cities such as Antioch and Tyre — where Chinese silk had already arrived by the time of Alexander the Great (4th century B.C.). In one 8th-century collection, the Shosoin collection (originally the property of a Japanese emperor), are found arts of the Mediterranean world, from Persia, India, Central Asia, China, Korea and Japan.

It wasn't just objects that migrated from East to West and vice versa. The transfer of such innovations as gunpowder, the magnetic compass, the printing press, silk, mathematical formulas, ceramic and lacquer crafts was only part of the story; musical instruments, forms and techniques, too, moved along the Silk Road. Lutes from India and Persia developed as close relatives; cymbals were introduced into China from India, and Chinese gongs journeyed to Europe.

The Persian mizmar, a reed instrument, appears to be an ancestor of the Western oboe and clarinet. An 8th-century Japanese biwa (pear-shaped lute) still bears its decorations of Persian and Central Asian designs, and ancient Roman glass-influenced objects made in the Far East.

An exploration for Ma

Fascinated by these cross-cultural influences, Ma — himself a product of Chinese, European and American cultural cross-threads — brought together an array of musicians from several countries to explore not only their traditional music, but also ideas for future collaborations.

"I wanted to explore this world," says Ma, who still sounds like a wide-eyed visionary after four years of planning the project.

"I wanted to hear these instruments I'd never heard of, in places I'd only read about. And I wanted to hear what some wonderful composers today would come up with."

An advisory panel reviewed the work of 40 contemporary composers from along the Silk Road routes, choosing 16 to create new works for the project. Those new works draw on each composer's traditions, as well as on modern musical ideas.

A list of "partner cities" also evolved, to host concerts and related activities in North America, Europe and Asia. (Seattle is one of only a handful of American venues in a list that includes Germany's Schleswig Holstein Musik Festival; four cities in Japan; Washington, D.C., and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival; Lyon and Paris, France; Brussels, Belgium; Amsterdam; Cologne, Germany; Berkeley, Calif.; Carnegie Hall in New York City and Chicago. The festival moves on to Italy, Vancouver, B.C., Toronto and finally Central Asia in the spring of 2003.)

Each "partner city" is hosting a completely different festival; in Berkeley, for instance, the Mark Morris Dance Group will be among the performers, and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival will offer a large lineup of free events. Other sites offer family concerts, ethnic foods, crafts demonstrations and a wide variety of other enhancements.

Seattle is getting more performances by Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble than many of the other host sites. The five main concerts will have Ma playing every night in varied international repertoire. Each program has at least one Western work influenced by Eastern sources, including the Kodaly Solo Cello Sonata (May 12), the Shostakovich Piano Trio No. 2 (May 13), Debussy Cello Sonata (May 14), Ravel Piano Trio (May 15) and both Borodin's "In the Steppes of Central Asia" and Respighi's "Ancient Airs and Dances" (May 16, in an orchestral program that also has Ma in Peter Lieberson's "The Six Realms").

Just hearing Ma in each of those works would be worth the price of admission; but the programs also feature a wealth of international music, with new and traditional works by such composers as Zhou Long, Da Qun Jia, Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky, Kayhan Kalhor, Joon-il Kang, Juan del Enzina, A. Adnan Saygun, Vache Sharafyan, Byambasuren Sharav, Zhao Jiping, Franghiz Ali-Zadeh (who already appeared in this city with the Seattle Chamber Players) and Michio Mamiya.

The Silk Road Ensemble

All but the May 16 concert will be chamber programs featuring Ma with the Silk Road Ensemble, a lineup that includes Siamak Aghaei (santur, or Persian struck zither), Tarana Aliyeva (qanun, Caucasian plucked zither), Nicholas Cords (viola), Dvorg Dabaghyan (duduk, or double-reed pipe of Central Asia and the Caucasus), Joel Fan (piano), Joseph Gramley (percussion), Colin Jacobsen (violin), Siamak Jahangiri (ney, end-blown flute of Turkey/Iran), Kahan Kalhor (kemancheh, Iranian spike fiddle), Khongorzul Ganbaatar (Mongolian "long song" singer), Dong-Won Kim (changgo, Korean percussion instrument), Ilham Najafov (ney and tutek), Alim Qasimov (vocalist), Shane Shanahan (percussion), Mark Suter (percussion), Kojiro Umezaki (shakuhachi, or Japanese flute), Wu Tong (sheng, a Chinese mouth organ) and Yang Wei (pipa, or Chinese lute), plus conductor Wolfgang Lischke.

Ma will play the morin khuur, or Mongolian horse fiddle, in addition to his cello.

Zhou Long, composer/conductor, will be composer in residence here during the festival; his work, "Two Poems from Tang," will be performed in the final concert, with Jahja Ling on the podium.

What will the concerts be like? Judging from the "Silk Road Journeys" CD, and from the evidence of two preliminary videotapes, we'll hear an enormous array of sounds and styles, and some playing on unfamiliar instruments that is unmistakably of virtuoso quality.

Keeping an open ear and an open mind — and taking advantage of some of the educational experiences, such as the preconcert talks (an hour before the curtain) — will allow listeners to connect with both ancient and modern music, most of it unknown to us. It's music that has influenced our past, via many of the great Western composers, and music that may well influence our future.

Melinda Bargreen: mbargreen@seattletimes.com.