On Monday, September 8, Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble give their first performance together at Paris’s Theatre des Champs-Élysées, celebrating 15 years of cultural exploration through music. For Silk Road Project founder Yo-Yo Ma, the concert is remarkable:
“In 1941, my father’s dissertation at the Sorbonne was published. The topic was ‘La musique chinoise du style Europeen.’ 60 years later, in 2001, the Silk Road Ensemble made its first world tour across three continents, addressing a similar idea: we performed music that spanned the Mediterranean to the Pacific, joining millennia-old traditions with contemporary forms, celebrating and connecting tradition with innovation. It is particularly moving to me that we are performing at the Theatre de Champs-Élysées, which opened in the heyday of Debussy and Ravel only 24 years after the Exposition Universelle where they first encountered gamelan music and other musics from around the world. This transformational moment had two results: the invention of a new ‘world classical music’, and music that became and remained even more quintessentially French. At Silk Road, for the past 15 years, we have been modeling this same value of joining tradition with innovation. We hope you will join us in our continuing exploration.”
Join Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble at the Theatre de Champs-Élysées.
