Music can uplift the human spirit. This is the drumbeat that drives Morgan Neville’s new documentary. The Oscar-winning director of Twenty Feet From Stardom films this new documentary’s musicians and other speakers testifying on behalf of this platitude, yet the film rarely demonstrates how the ideal actually works in practice. Personally, I would have liked to see a savage breast or two being charmed.
The film provides an overview of the international collective of musicians who heeded legendary cellist Yo-Yo Ma’s call to come together as the Silk Road Ensemble. In 2000, the virtuoso and musical ambassador was casting about for a reinvigorating idea and thought to invite dozens of musicians from around the globe to join him at Tanglewood in Massachusetts to discover what new sounds they might create when combining their various musical cultures and instruments. Instead of preserving the past, Ma was looking to forge something fresh and different. Sixteen years, six albums, and numerous performances later, The Music of Strangers peers in at the clearly successful experiment. This is not a performance film, however. In fact, we never get to witness a whole piece unfold from beginning to end. What the film does offer is individualized looks at the lives and backgrounds of several of the ensemble’s key players.
To no one’s surprise, the highlighted musicians are an interesting lot, although the film never confronts the ironic actuality that their involvement in the Silk Road project and its globalist ideals made them feel closer to their homelands and their distinctive instruments, and also sparked a greater desire to preserve their domestic musical heritages. Forging the new gave them a greater appreciation of the past.
Cristina Pato is called “the Jimi Hendrix of the gaita,” or the Galician bagpipe, and we see her onstage playing with rock bands as well as the Silk Road Ensemble. Kayhan Kalhor of Iran plays the kamancheh, or Persian spiked fiddle, but discovers a younger generation who knows nothing of the instrument because it is not being taught, a situation he tries to remedy when politics don’t keep him an exile from his own country. Wu Man of China is the world’s premier pipa (or lute) player. When she was younger, she felt she had to leave China in order to collaborate freely with international musicians, but during visits back to her homeland, she now tries to document some of the ancient musical traditions and share them with the world. Kinan Azmeh of Syria plays the clarinet, but his country has become a war zone in his absence, and the film shows him visiting refugee camps with a visual artist, encouraging children to use the arts to express themselves.
These musicians’ backstories are not uninteresting, but they feel like tangential subjects. Neville’s attention wanders throughout his movie, speaking about Ma with such observers as the cellist’s son and composer John Williams, before skipping down the Silk Road to the homelands of the aforementioned musicians. But what of the ensemble Ma put together? What we hear is so scant that it really is the music of strangers.
This article appears in July 8 • 2016.
