Silk Road

Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble, which appeared at Royce Hall Friday night, included Western strings, brass and percussion, a Mongolian long song singer, a Chinese pipa player, an Indian tabla player and three Iranian musicians performing on native instruments. The music was more East than West, with works by Mongolian, Iranian and Indian composers, along with traditional Chinese and Iranian music. Debussy, who cocked his ear in the direction of Asia, stood in for Europe.

New excavations at the Egyptian Red Sea port of Berenike show that an extensive sea trade existed between India and the Middle East from the 3rd century BC to the 7th century AD, supplementing the much more widely known Silk Road.

Cellist Yo-Yo Ma is talking about Central Asia while, thousands of miles away, the United States is bombing it. For years, Ma has been planning a project that's now come to fruition: an East-meets-West musical overview of the cultures and countries linked by the network of trading routes known as the Silk Road. Tonight, an international gathering of 13 musicians--dubbed the Silk Road Ensemble--will join Ma in Washington for the first concert of its American tour.

There are many things that secular entertainment can have in common with sacred ritual: a sense of high formality, a special language and location, and the comforting feeling of having order imposed on chaos. Balanchine used to say that the theater is like a church. Still, he never confused Lincoln Center with St. Patrick's Cathedral. In the world of Hirokazu Kosaka, however, this is not an inconceivable juxtaposition.

High in the jagged Pamir Mountains, where wolves and snow leopards prowl a desolate no man's land, small squads of men are fighting a losing battle against a rising tide of opium and heroin sweeping toward the West. Foot soldiers in the war on drugs, these police and customs agents stand sentinel along the remote alpine highway that threads north from Afghanistan into the rock-ribbed underbelly of Central Asia.

A series of caravan trails linking Asia with Europe, the Silk Road, brought gunpowder, the compass, paper and printing to the West along with Chinese fabrics and porcelain. A sampling of dances from the varied cultures along this fabled trade route might make a fascinating fantasy journey.

If the Silk Road traders of 2,000 years ago were to guide their camel caravans into the bustling new bazaars here, it wouldn't take them long to cut a deal. The Chinese stereos, Korean televisions and Japanese cameras might baffle them, but they wouldn't miss a beat haggling over Oriental carpets, Iranian fruit and Indian sandals.

The music began as we stepped off our bus in the adobe village of Wupu in northwestern China. Barely perceptible at first, a seductive whine gathered force as it welled up in the throats of middle-aged men and reverberated from their long-necked stringed instruments and sheep-skin tambourines. Next came the dancers--a troupe of little girls, 6 or 8 years old, with winsome smiles, velvety brown eyes and shiny pigtails.