The night of Feb. 19, Elizabethtown College students gathered in Gibble Auditorium to watch and discuss the documentary “The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble.”
The Center for Global Understanding and Peacemaking (CGUP), as well as Elizabethtown’s Fine and Performing Arts Department, sponsored the event.
Professor of history and Director of CGUP, Dr. David Kenley, hosted it.
Two seniors, political science major Ken Wallace and mass communications major Kenyon Tarquinio, led the discussion afterwards.
The documentary details the formation of the Silk Road Ensemble, a diverse group of musicians whose members come from all over the world.
Yo-Yo Ma, the prodigal cellist who formed the group, travelled the world because he wanted to make new music via the intersection of different cultures.
Through the stories of Yo-Yo Ma and four Silk Road members, the documentary explores the relationship between music and culture.
Through multiple musical performances, personal anecdotes, and both newly taken and archived footage, the documentary shows the history of each member, how they came to be a member of the Silk Road Ensemble, and how they’ve since used their music to interact with the culture they grew up in.
Many of the artists suffered hardships in their lives.
One person’s story that struck students was that of Kayhan Kalhor, who was forced to leave Iran after the start of the nation’s revolution. At only seventeen years old, he walked out of the country with nothing but a backpack and his musical instrument—a kamancheh—and took odd jobs all across Europe to support himself before making it to the United States.
“To see and hear these musicians’ stories and all the challenges they’ve overcome, and just how kind they are to one another and everyone they meet—that’s inspiring,” Wallace said. “I feel a lot better about life and humanity after watching this.”
Both Wallace and Tarquinio come from musical backgrounds, and thus found the musical aspect of the documentary interesting.
“I think [the documentary] made me more aware that a lot of the people involved in this project play instruments and play from traditions that are very, very old,” Tarquinio said. “I think that it’s important to keep those traditions alive, but also to strive to do something new with it.”
The documentary ends with the passing of each artist’s musical experience onto others in their culture. In one story, Chinese pipa player Wu Man provided her expertise to the Zhang Family Puppet Show, practitioners of a slowly dying art.
In another, Syrian clarinet player Kinan Azmeh smuggled flutes to teach a group of children in Syrian refugee camps how to play.
It ends on a shot of a young girl playing the piano with Yo-Yo Ma watching—the idea of music passing down from one generation to the next.
“I was almost crying at the end,” Tarquinio said.
After the documentary finished, students stayed to discuss it. Topics on the table included the relationship between politics and art, the reason behind Yo-Yo Ma’s decision to create the Silk Road Ensemble, and the changes the artists went through on their journeys.
During the discussion, one student highlighted the intersection of old and new art in a scene where the ensemble’s music was accompanied by modern dance; another discussed how xenophobia in America after the 9/11 attacks negatively impacted members of Silk Road Ensemble.
Kenley said that, after watching the documentary, he hoped students would reflect on their own traditions, and how “those traditions enrich us and… people from beyond your own cultural spheres and vice versa. You’ll appreciate how other cultural traditions can make your own practices and traditions more meaningful and more vibrant and more significant.”
This film screening was one of many events that is meant to get students excited for the upcoming Ware Lecture on Peacemaking.
Hosted each spring by CGUP, the lecture brings in people from all professions to promote peace-making on campus.
This year, five members of the Silk Road Ensemble will come to engage the audience with a mixture of “performance as well as dialogue,” Kenley said.
The Ware Lecture is April 11 at 7:30 p.m. Students must reserve tickets if they wish to attend, but the event is free.
For those who can not wait for the lecture, there are other pre-Ware events coming up soon, including a panel discussing globalization at 11 a.m. Wednesday, Feb. 27 in Gibble Auditorium.
