Volume 21 Issue 1 - September 2015

MAX WHITTAKER
(“Behind the Cello” 2014)
Not everyone has been eager to jump on the “we are the world” bandwagon,
however. For decades numerous critical voices have raised
concerns about globalization’s dire effects: on one hand that it further
marginalizes rural and minority forms of expression, sometimes
pushing them to the point of extinction, and on the other hand privileging
commercially dominant mass-mediated ones. Ma’s optimistic
view firmly stresses globalization’s positive rewards however, summarized
by his statement, “globalization creates culture.”
His SRE musical journeys have only reinforced this conviction. Interactions
brought about by globalization “don’t just destroy culture; they
can create new culture and invigorate and spread traditions that have
existed for ages precisely because of the ‘edge effect,’” notes Ma in
“Behind the Cello.” “Sometimes the most interesting things happen at
the edge. The intersections there can reveal unexpected connections.
Culture is a fabric composed of gifts from every corner of the world.”
As a leading cello soloist, it’s almost predictable that Ma would cite
the story of one of the movements in J.S. Bach’s Cello Suites, at the core
of cello repertoire, to support his main thesis. He tells us it’s one of his
favourite stories.
“At the heart of each suite is a dance movement called the sarabande.
The dance and its music originated among the North African Berbers,
where it was a slow, sensual dance. It next appeared in Spain where it
was banned because it was considered lewd and lascivious. Spaniards
brought it to the Americas, but it also traveled on to France, where it
became a courtly dance. In the 1720s, Bach incorporated the sarabande
as a movement in his Cello Suites. Today, I play Bach [as] a Paris-born
American musician of Chinese parentage.
So who really owns the sarabande? Each
culture has adopted the music, investing
it with specific meaning, but each culture
must share ownership: it belongs to us all.”
(“Behind the Cello” 2014)
Ma’s tracing of the sarabande’s musical
(but also choreographic) journey, a string of
exchanges and evolutions, bring to light at least six geo-cultural regional
affiliations: North African, Spanish, American, French, German and
Chinese. Ma’s statement, moreover, forcefully promotes inclusiveness
and multiple authenticities while challenging normative monocultural
ownership models and also by implication, notions of simple cultural
authenticity and “purity.” In his statement Ma proposes an equitable
extension of ownership of cultural practices across several regions, rather
than to sole actors, further suggesting its ultimate and most appropriate
resting place is universal (“ownership…belongs to us all”).
Ma also points out in “Behind the Cello” the importance of cultural
“necessary edges,” liminal boundaries where intersections and exchanges
“I feel that only if you know your
roots can you then imagine how to
create something new.”
Wu Man
often first take place, using another metaphor borrowed from another
discipline. “The ‘edge effect’ in ecology occurs at the border where two
ecosystems – for example the savannah and forest – meet. At that interface,
where there is the least density and the greatest diversity of life
forms, each living thing can draw from the core of the two ecosystems.
That is where new life forms emerge.”
Human society also requires such necessary
edge sites, he argues. “The hard sciences
are probing one far end of the bandwidth,
searching for the origins of the universe
or the secrets of the genome. People in the
arts are probing the other far end of the
bandwidth.” He concludes that only when
“science and the arts, critical and empathetic reasoning, are linked to
the mainstream will we find a sustainable balance in society.”
Is this the sort of liminal juncture, the “necessary edge” where the SRE
also does its most creative, its most culturally valuable work?
Having a Toronto street named after him – Yo-Yo Ma Lane runs across
from the Music Garden he helped design – certainly gives a living musician
street cred in this too often cold burg. And there is evidence that
the SRE’s secular universalist musical philosophy may have a particular
resonance with Toronto audiences’ musical values and expectations.
Chris Lorway, director of programming and marketing for Massey Hall/
Roy Thomson agrees. In an August 18 e-mail he wrote that SRE’s guiding
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