Yo-Yo Ma, 51, says that Chicago is a major stop on the Silk Road. Chicago is half a world away from the legendary trade route that linked East and Central Asia with Europe, but the distance hasn't kept local cultural institutions from joining the cellist's decade-old Silk Road Project with enthusiasm.
Silk Road Chicago, the project's first citywide collaboration, is approaching the end of a year long run involving more than 70 organizations, as well as Ma's own internationally recruited Silk Road Ensemble. Last year's inaugural concert brought a record audience of 13,500 to Chicago's downtown Millennium Park, and Ma expects to see an even larger crowd for the finale, which will include hundreds of students from the city's public schools.
Of Chinese ancestry, born in Paris, Ma is the son of a musicologist. Although he first came to the United States. He studied with his mentor, Leonard Rose, at the Juilliard School in New York, but he also earned a liberal arts degree from Harvard University, where anthropology courses led him to study the music of Africa's Kalahari bushmen.
Ma says his study of history led him to realize that Eastern and Western cultures are not self-contained, but have mixed since at least the time of Alexander the Great. The pattern continues with instruments, too. To Ma, the notion of cultural purity is a dead end. (Source: AP, Apr 8, 2007).