It seems long ago now, back in the sixties, when Terry Riley and numerous fellow travelers absorbed so much of the music of India, the aesthetic and the techniques, into our culture that it eventually made momentous impact, as everyone must realize today. Around that time, the late Yehudi Menuhin was joined in performance with Ravi Shankar. There was even a sitarist/composer (name forgotten) who made a raga out of Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 1. Some of that was successful, a normal percentage of it flopped. One need only recall the dread committee-composed Yellow River Piano Concerto.

One needn’t go back as far as the tasting of Turkish music that Mozart and his contemporaries enjoyed, or the orientalizing by French operatic and Russian nationalist composers, and by English and American composers who fed the salon repertory with pieces touched with “exotic” flavor (Albert Ketèlbey comes to mind). On the first of the three “Silk Road Project” programs here, Yo Yo Ma included Ravel’s Piano Trio, commenting beforehand on that composer’s being influenced by hearing the gamelan and other Asian music during the historic Paris Exposition of 1899. (See Michelle Dulak’s review in this issue.)

In our time, the momentum of intercultural musical exchange has increased geometrically, and with it, the crossfertilization. Each year, it seems that the number of visiting performing ensembles from different cultures increases, along with the number of countries represented. The knowledge of these different cultures and their music grows too, as universities add more ethnomusicologists to their staffs and in consequence, sponsor more performances.

Last Monday and Tuesday at Cal, there was a (public) academic conference on the “Silk Road” subject involving scholars from London, Hawaii, Dartmouth and Hunter Colleges, and UC Berkeley, as well as an art exhibition, “Masterworks of Chinese Paintings: In Pursuit of Mists and Clouds” ( until May 26), a Composition and Ethnomusicology Colloquium, a photographic exhibit, and the creation of a Silk Road Digital Atlas “to highlight the diffusion od musical, artistic and religious cultures in Central Asia, an activity of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, a “Berkeley-based global consortium.” The Silk Road Project would then seem to be riding the crest of a wave that has been building for a long time.

History and trends aside, how did it fare last week? Tuesday’s program (reviewed by Michelle Dulak today) was far more effective than Wednesday’s. That second program began falling off after its short opening work, Ma’s solo cello Partita by A. Adnan Saygun, of Turkey. It was a lyrical piece, in no way referring to the Baroque, specifically Bach partitas. In phrasing, structure and feeling, Partita spoke with immediacy, Ma’s playing making it exquisite. Saygun didn’t overreach as others on the program did.

The issue with a cross-cultural composition is one of criteria. By what standard and in what aesthetic is the work to be perceived? It must be the product of a real and gifted composer, strong enough a composition to establish its own measure, as Takemitsu’s pieces are. To an extent, Vache Sharafyan’s The Sun, the Wine, and the Wind of Time (from Armenia, 1998) created its own time and space. The western tradition was reflected in its overall song-form structure and writing for piano, violin and cello. The featured lead woodwind was one common to the countries in the Caucasus, the duduk. This is a short wooden tube with nine finger holes, played by blowing through a wide double reed, producing a surprisingly vocal sound, like a baritone kazoo, in a clarinet’s mid-range .

In distinct sections, the work moved from slow to fast, with varied accompanying ideas and intensities, many stylistic influences. There were repeated piano glissandi, the strings playing sustained harmonies as atmospheric background under the duduk solo, piano figurations with an improvisatory quality, separated repeated strokes on the cello, plucking of the piano strings, finally a return to the opening moaning solo of the duduk. It might have been haunting had it been less strung out and uneven in the design of its sections.

Two pieces described simply as “Classical Music from Azerbaijan” featured the “legendary voice” of that country, Alim Qasimov, seated cross-legged on a low carpeted platform between a musician on the tar (long-necked lute) and a player of the Persian/Armenian/Azerbaijanian kemancheh, a spike fiddle of four strings, possibly related to the Chinese erhu. (Was it a Silk Road migrant in ancient times?) Qasimov’s voice, placed between chest and head, seems not cultivated for carrying strength, the emphasis being on flexibility, every phrase ending on a vibrant ululation. Both songs seemed to be narrative, one dramatic, the other a cheerful, possibly dance.

Qasimov, his body sometimes shaking, gesticulated in evidently traditional patterns, presumably to punctuate the text, while using frame drums of two different sizes, for percussion. In its thin but pervasive tone, the kemanche doubled the voice or sustained accompanying pitches, while the tar (distantly suggesting the Chinese pipa) played a supportive role.

Having no idea of the songs’ texts made this a less than immediate experience. It provided a feeling for the style and also a perceptible sense that this music overlapped or perhaps coincided closely with music of other cultures in the general region and even easterly. This was a “Silk Road” example for sure.

The Japanese work, Kio, didn’t work. Despite the sensitive efforts of the shakuhachi soloist, Kojiro Umezaki, and the intense performance of Yo Yo Ma, Michi Mamiya’s duet for those instruments, was a barren effort. The cello flayed furiously on non-pitched sounds against short, disconnected phrases of the shakuhachi whose meditative, mysterious effect was vitiated by the cello part. The duet suggested a symbolic struggle.

As a closer, came the big number, contributed by Kayan Kalhor who divides his time between his native Iran and New York. His Blue as the Turquoise Night of Neyshabur features the kemancheh, ney (an soft-voiced end-blown wooden flute used from North Africa to Central Asia), the tabla (percussion) and santur. The santur is a hammer dulcimer, much like the Hungarian cembalom (and perhaps the original source of that) only it is lighter and has a shorter, higher range. These instruments were accompanied passively by a string septet, sustaining a very slow-changing harmony. Variously rhapsodic, exotic and vigorous, the piece set up improvisatory sections for the santur, tabla and cello, much like jazz solos .

Perhaps this succeeds in the context of Persian music, but this arrangement, giving no sense of what was being varied or developed, simply meandered. Blue as... simply wound up in an agitated fury that seemed to grow out of nothing but the need for a big ending. The output of high energy, as such, brought a fairly high energy response from the audience, as tends to happen these days.

Impossible to say where play of crosscultural or intercultural music leads or what the outcome will be. Possibly the spread of technology and the globalization of information, culture and everything else will lead to the corruption of the “pure” music of other cultures. Or, given that such music hasn’t actually been “pure” for a long time, even in its pre-globalized state, it will continue to evolve, fertilized by the new, “foreign” ideas. This has been going on for a half century in Japan, to choose just one country, and there’s been beautiful music come out of it, along with the dross. Or, given the particular sensibilities and spiritual basis of the different music of these ancient cultures, the mergers will produce something that still manages to emanate in the different voices of those cultures.

Ma’s summary remarks on the project are helpful: “As we interact with unfamiliar musical traditions, we encounter voices that are not exclusive to one community. We discover trans-national voices that belong to one world.” So whatever happens, the experience can be reassuring of our shared humanity. Since globalization is inevitably having its effect on individual, separated culture anyway, bringing those cultures’ creative artists into a deliberate association with each other may help them preserve the essence of their separate heritages. That after all, is what happened from 200 B.C. to A.D. 1500 in the long haul over the original Silk Road.

________________________Robert Commanday

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