The music of when strangers meet

Yo-Yo Ma, famed Cellist and founder of the Silk Road Ensemble in the film The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble.PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY

Dream team

Then there are the players themselves, all, like Ma, superstars of their particular axe, hunted down and rounded up with the help of top ethnomusicologists and music scholars from around the country.

"We didn't have to look far," Ma told China Daily. "The Shashmaqan people who would sing in the Persian style and the stars who would sing for 40,000 people in Uzbekistan were living in Queens and owning a restaurant, or a large Mongolian population living in New Jersey, or among the 60,000 Afghans in the Bay Area.

"You can look far and find unbelievably brilliant talents. And you look close by, and you also find them, because this is — we are — a world nation," he said.

"The mix works when the values are not about saying: 'My culture's the best in the world; it's the only thing that matters.' But rather: 'I know something that's very, very precious to me and I want to share that with the world, but I'm also really interested in the world. I want to learn from the world.'

"When you have that kind of thinking, you have the makings of an ensemble," he said.

Ma said they set out by acknowledging a simple truth: "Nobody knows everything."

"We're not trying to be the world's expert on anything," he said. "We're all about learning and creating. The best kind of teaching is when you're learning. And the best kind of learning is when you are also sharing what you have learned with others."

With that cue, Ma said, it became easy for the musicians to turn to each other and say, 'Okay, you know something I don't know. Teach me what you know'.

When it came to enmeshing the various ethnic modalities, the Persian scale was an example of some of the minor hurdles they faced. Unlike much of the world's more familiar music, Persian scales can have notes in between those found on a piano. In other words, a note that to Western ears sounds out of tune.

"So what sounds different, or sounds strange, you actually have to make beautiful," Ma explained. "The idea is that you are in it the moment you shift from saying: 'Oh, that E is the out-of-tune note' to saying: 'Oh, I love the way it sounds.'"