With a documentary called “The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble,” there’s no doubting that wonderful sounds will be in store. But that’s not all that’s on offer.
For, as directed by Morgan Neville, “Strangers” turns out to be as concerned with emotion as with performance, spending much of its time investigating how so much joyous music was able to come out of exploration, disturbance, even pain.
At the center of everything is 60-year-old cellist Ma, one of his generation’s most prolific and popular classical artists, with more than 90 albums and 18 Grammy wins to his credit, a total he self-deprecatingly dismisses by saying “it’s all statistics.”
“Strangers” is the story of how and why in 2000, this consummate musician decided to branch out into unexpected areas and create the Silk Road Ensemble, an international music collective that has produced six albums and given concerts for 2 million people in 33 countries. And director Neville is very much the filmmaker for the job of telling it.
Best known for his Oscar-winning “20 Feet From Stardom,” Neville has made a number of music-themed documentaries. He is as expert at getting the human stories behind the music as he is in capturing.
It begins with Ma, a former child prodigy who’s performed for eight presidents and can be seen, in a delightful clip, upstaging Leonard Bernstein with a very serious face when he was just 7. Yet because he started so young, Ma, brilliant as he was, couldn’t help feeling, “I never committed to being a musician, I just fell into it.”
Making things more difficult was the toll Ma’s extensive touring — he estimates he has spent 22 of the 35 years he’s been married on the road — took on his life. “I was so anxious, I threw up before every trip,” the musician reports. His son, Nicholas, says he initially thought his father worked for the airport because he was always going there.
As wonderful as the Silk Road Ensemble’s music is to experience — the open-air performance in Istanbul that starts things off is especially infectious — “Strangers” does not shy from acknowledging that the philosophy behind this musical melding was initially criticized by some for being impure, a kind of cultural tourism.
Helping to counterbalance that is the film’s focus on a quartet of the Silk Road Ensemble’s more than 20 players, mini-bios of virtuosos from all over who share an attraction for the wider world. One of the paradoxes that unites the players is that their participation in the ensemble has heightened their commitment to the specificity of their own musical traditions.
“Through the process of going away he found himself at home again,” says Ma’s son, Nicholas, and observing that process is one of this film’s many joys.
