YO-YO MA / THE INSPIRATION SERIES
Listen.
There is more
in the room.
A cello, a familiar score,
and an expanding company of people.
By Rob Urban
A cello is a rather substantial thing to bring to a conversation. Yo-Yo Ma has spent a remarkable career finding people worth bringing it to.
I admire the musicianship, of course. What keeps my attention is the curiosity around it: who else is playing, what they know, what a place can teach, and how a familiar piece might sound when we return to it.
There is a particular pleasure in encountering someone who knows an extraordinary amount and still appears eager for another person’s contribution. Expertise can make an introduction richer. It can give a collaboration more possibilities.
Ma’s work offers many ways to hear that happen. The names beside his on a recording, the local partners beside a concert, and the people describing their home all deserve our attention.
RETURNING
The same music.
Another hearing.
Six Evolutions returns to Bach’s six suites for unaccompanied cello. Ma’s official biography identifies it as his third recording of the cycle.
I find that return reassuring. Something familiar can remain large enough for another serious encounter.
The composition is recognizable, yet a performance contains choices about pace, emphasis, space and the relation between phrases. One instrument carries the listener through changes in direction and feeling.
That is part of what makes interpretation interesting to me. Knowledge can deepen the question of how a piece should unfold. Familiarity can sharpen attention.
A listener gets a corresponding freedom: to return without needing to prove that everything has become new. Sometimes we are the part that has changed.
THE BACH PROJECT
A concert, and
a local question.
The Bach Project, launched in 2018, paired performances of the suites with locally developed activity across a planned thirty-six locations.
Artists, community organizations and other partners helped shape the accompanying conversations and events. The concert provided a common element; each place could contribute its own interests.
I like that arrangement because a visitor’s expertise and a community’s knowledge have somewhere to meet. The musician brings music he has lived with. Other people bring an understanding of the place where he has arrived.
The format makes room for a question that belongs to the hosts. A performance can become an occasion to notice what is already happening around it.
THE BERKSHIRES
Build a table.
Make room.
In the Berkshires in August 2019, that occasion included building tables.
Teams from thirty-six local organizations and businesses worked with the Naked Table Project and Berkshire Woodworkers Guild to make tables and benches for local homes and organizations. The Berkshire Jazz Collective played; artists from Blue Q led a mural project.
A conversation about making also brought Ma together with local cultural leaders and craftspeople.
I love the material specificity. A table has joints, a surface, a purpose, and eventually people around it. Making something together gives a conversation a task to share.
The event brought several kinds of knowledge into the same setting. Music was part of the day, alongside woodworking, visual art and the relationships among local groups. That feels like a rewarding way for a concert visit to become more than a concert.
SILKROAD
Let the differences
be heard.
Silkroad’s own history traces its conception to Ma in 1998, drawing on the historic Silk Road as a model for cultural exchange. It brought musicians from different traditions together to make work.
The organization now identifies Rhiannon Giddens as its artistic director. That continuing life under another artist’s leadership is part of the achievement.
What appeals to me is the possibility of difference remaining audible. Musicians can bring distinct histories, instruments and habits of listening into a shared piece. The point of meeting is partly to discover what another person can contribute.
Founding such a space is a generous creative act. Its future can contain ideas its founder could not have supplied alone.
AMERICAN RAILROAD
The people
behind the route.
Silkroad’s American Railroad project makes that continuing authorship concrete.
Among its commissions, Wu Man’s “Rainy Day” combines pipa, banjo and voice while reflecting on Chinese wives and mothers separated from family members working on the railroad. Haruka Fujii’s “Tamping Song” recognizes Japanese immigrant contributions. Maeve Gilchrist’s “Far Down Far” considers divisions among Irish workers.
I appreciate how the project gives specific histories and artists room. A railway can be familiar as a route on a map while the lives behind its construction remain less familiar.
Music gives the audience another way to stay with those lives. This chapter belongs to Giddens and the participating artists; it also shows why the collaborative institution Ma helped begin remains worth following.
HUSH / THE GOAT RODEO SESSIONS
The pleasure
of company.
There is abundant play in the recording catalogue, too. Hush, from 1991, pairs Ma with Bobby McFerrin. Voice and cello become a particularly inviting place to consider phrase, breath and response.
Then there is The Goat Rodeo Sessions, the 2011 collaboration with Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile. The artist biography credits both ensembles.
Even the track names, including “Quarter Chicken Dark” and “Where’s My Bow?”, offer a cheerful welcome.
I like the coexistence of considerable ability and a willingness to enjoy it. These musicians have distinct identities. The pleasure is in the combination, in hearing what becomes possible when they can respond to one another.
That gives a curious listener an easy next step: follow a collaborator’s name into another recording.
OUR COMMON NATURE
Hear the people
who know the place.
Our Common Nature extends the encounters toward land and the people who know it. A seven-episode podcast follows Ma with host Ana González through places including Maine, Appalachia and Hawaii.
The project introduces Nipmuck musician Hawk Henries, Zuni farmer Jim Enote and Diné archaeologist Jason Nez. It also includes a performance with Kathy Mattea for retired miners in West Virginia.
The names matter. A landscape holds histories and relationships that a visitor cannot learn by looking at a beautiful view.
I appreciate the invitation to listen to the people with those relationships. Their knowledge gives the place more dimensions.
It is a connection I also value in Mae Jemison’s work: different forms of understanding can meet and enlarge the questions we know how to ask.
The quality I keep coming back to is a kind of interested attention.
A familiar score deserves another hearing. A musician from another tradition has something to offer. A craftsperson knows how to make a useful object. A person who lives beside a river knows things a visitor has yet to notice.
Ma’s work makes those encounters feel worth seeking. His ability brings people close enough to listen, and the people he joins give that listening somewhere further to go.
I admire the warmth of that invitation. You can arrive because you know the cellist’s name and leave curious about a whole company of people.
Sources: Yo-Yo Ma’s official biography, recordings and project accounts; the Bach Project’s Berkshires program; and Silkroad’s organizational history and American Railroad project. Linked throughout. Appreciation and interpretation by Rob Urban.