Yo-Yo Ma & Silkroad Ensemble

The Silkroad Ensemble emerged from an initiative launched in 1998 by Yo-Yo Ma, forming a Grammy-winning collective that unites dozens of musicians, composers, storytellers, and additional creators. Ma envisioned assembling performers drawn from varied traditions so they could exchange concepts, join forces onstage, and ultimately enrich listeners’ perspectives. At the outset the participants delved into the heritage and idioms of the lands traversed by the historic Silk Road linking Europe with East Asia, employing indigenous instruments. Their debut recording, Silk Road Journey: When Strangers Meet, reached stores in 2002. Thereafter the repertoire broadened to encompass the wider world while embracing both freshly composed pieces and reimagined older repertoire. In 2015 the project became the focus of the documentary The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble. The following year the ensemble earned its first Grammy with Sing Me Home. The umbrella organization, Silkroad, has likewise grown into an expansive nonprofit that convenes artists across disciplines, educators, and entrepreneurs for mutual dialogue and learning.

The 2002 debut Silk Road Journey: When Strangers Meet introduced audiences to traditional sounds from multiple heritages and earned widespread acclaim for its worldwide reach, as did the 2005 follow-up Silk Road Journeys: Beyond the Horizon. A partnership with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra produced 2007’s New Impossibilities, which documented a yearlong residency spanning the city; issued by Sony Classical like the first two albums, it climbed to the upper tier of the Billboard Classical Albums chart. World Village released Off the Map in 2009, showcasing scores written expressly for the group by Gabriela Lena Frank, Angel Lam, Evan Ziporyn, and Osvaldo Golijov; without Ma’s participation the album secured a Grammy nomination for Best Classical Crossover Album. Ma rejoined the ensemble for the 2013 Sony release A Playlist Without Borders. Sing Me Home, captured while Morgan Neville filmed the documentary The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, appeared on Sony in early 2016 as the film entered the festival circuit; the album topped the classical, classical crossover, and world charts before claiming the Grammy for Best World Music Album.

The ensemble next supplied the soundtrack for Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s documentary The Vietnam War; the recording surfaced on In a Circle Records when the ten-part series debuted on PBS in September 2017. In 2020 the Silkroad Ensemble issued a performance of Golijov’s tone poem Falling Out of Time, the composer’s first major work in more than ten years, drawn from David Grossman’s novel and again conceived for the group.