No one walking into Sanders Theater last Thursday night for the Silk Road Ensemble’s sold-out performance knew exactly what to expect—performers and audience alike.

The Ensemble members, including Silk Road founder Yo-Yo Ma ’76, were playing with five Harvard students they had met only days earlier. An Armenian artist drew improvised images to accompany the music and projected them onto a huge screen. Few, if any, of the listeners had ever heard a song with string parts for a traditional Persian kamancheh.

But according to one audience member, Frank L. Washburn ’08, the group’s final piece, “Night at the Caravanserai,” took those feelings of uncertain excitement to an ecstatic level. There were “at least 10 false climaxes,” he says, before a finale that “elicited gasps of surprise and smatterings of applause.”

The entire performance was a kind of false climax, however thrilling the audience may have found it. Although the Silk Road players have since packed up their neys, santurs, and violins to leave for Japan, the Silk Road Project (SRP) has only just begun its five-year residency at Harvard, one that may lead to the development of a new Core course—and a serious reevaluation of the way the university addresses multi-cultural and interdisciplinary studies.

For both Harvard and the SRP, this residency has little precedent and a challenging amorphous but larval mandate. But therein lies enormous potential to invigorate the musical, cultural, curricular and extra-curricular worlds of Harvard.

STARTING POINTS

In a way, the origins of the concept behind the Project lie right here at Harvard College. Ma wrote in an e-mail, “Through being at Harvard I realized how incomplete my education was, and that for the rest of my life, I would be encountering worlds I didn’t know how to deal with. Harvard taught me how to deal with new knowledge and how to ally myself with people who know things I don’t.”

In 1998, after having attained world fame as a concert cellist, Ma put that awareness into practice by establishing the Silk Road Project. Funded by private donors, the group, as their artistic mission statement puts it, “acts as an umbrella organization and common resource for a number of artistic, cultural and educational programs,” focus on the Silk Road of antiquity.

It’s an ambitious ideology, considering the scope of the titular Silk Road. The term is shorthand for an intricate system of trade routes that stretched from Japan to the Mediterranean, with stops throughout Central Asia and the Middle East, from roughly 1600 B.C.E. until 8th century C.E.

Along its pathways, merchants freely exchanged both goods and ideas. In terms of its importance to world culture, Folger Fund Professor of History and East Asian historian Andrew D. Gordon ’74 says the development of the Silk Road was a critical cultural landmark: “The Crusades, the Black Plague, the Renaissance—it ranks right up there with all of them.”

To honor the Silk Road’s legacy of fusion among Eastern and Western cultures, Ma and a rotating group of musicians from around the world play traditional and original music in concert and host educational events. They’ve recorded three albums and traveled from Manhattan to Kyrgyzstan. But according to SRP Chief Executive Officer Laura Freid, the organization agreed last year on the need to “look for a new intellectual home”

“The musicians were interested in participating in university courses, conducting workshops, master classes and giving public performances,” says Freid. “We were all interested in exploring the Silk Road from an art history, ethnomusicology, language, and civilization perspective.”

Harvard was an obvious choice—not only is Ma a graduate, but so is SRP Executive Board member Judith A. Goldberg , who graduated from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education in 1991. Freid, too, has a connection; she’s a former editor of Harvard Magazine.