Yo-Yo Ma spoke informally yesterday afternoon in Spaulding Auditorium about his career, focusing on his most recent experiments in Eastern music with the Silk Road Ensemble.
Ma said he first became interested in such music when he attended a fiddle performance by violinist Mark O'Connor. He was so excited that he went backstage and asked, "Do you give lessons?"
According to Ma, his undergraduate liberal arts education in history and anthropology at Harvard University also sparked his interest in studying the music of diverse cultures.
Ma described reading about the formation of new nations after the break-up of the Soviet Union, and wondering about the cultures of such unfamiliar places. His travels to exotic nations such as Jordan, Turkey and Japan also influenced Ma's interest in the Silk Road Ensemble.
During the ensuing question and answer period, Ma spoke about his doubts in wanting to be a cellist in the first place.
Since he started to play very early, he never had time to question whether or not he wanted to be a musician. The world's premier cellist said he did not even consider himself a cellist until he had reached his late thirties.
Dartmouth Professor of Music Ted Levin and fellow Silk Road Ensemble member Hu Jianbing also spoke at the discussion.
Levin, who currently serves as executive director of the Silk Road Ensemble, said he first became interested in non-Western music during a trip to Israel he took at age 20 to discover his Jewish roots.
There, he discovered the magical sound of the muezzin, he said. Ma jokingly asked Levin what his Jewish parents thought of the fact that he had traveled to Israel to learn about Islam.
An auto breakdown in the middle of Germany finally clinched Levin's decision to work on the Silk Road Ensemble. Levin said that he had won a travel fellowship, and he and his brother had planned to drive across Europe and through Russia, to the Middle East. After his car broke down, Levin said he debated whether to continue on, and because they did, the trip proved to be musically enriching.
Jianbing noted that while she was raised in China and studied mostly classical Chinese music at conservatory, her natural curiosity about the music of other cultures drew her to the project.
Moving to the U.S. 10 years ago and encountering many different forms in music when visiting New York has enhanced her understanding of different musics, she added.
Ma played briefly on a Mongolian horse head fiddle for the audience. This type of fiddle is a trapezoid-shaped stringed instrument approximately the size of a viola. Its neck and pegs are much larger, closer in size to those of a cello.
Ma said he first became interested in Mongolian music when he saw four Mongolian musicians perform in Amsterdam. According to Ma, the Mongolian musicians drove 10,000 kilometers to Amsterdam. He described them as "not only fabulous musicians, but also fabulous car mechanics."
