Last spring, the SRP held a brief residency at the Rhode Island School of Design, but had an even bigger plan in the works for Harvard.

After talks with various Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) officials, the SRP and FAS issued a joint press release on March 30 announcing that the Silk Road Project would be in residency at Harvard from the fall of 2005 until the fall of 2010. The initiative would include various performances and projects at Harvard during that period.

At the time, FAS had its own reasons to be interested in a group like Silk Road—the ongoing Harvard College Curricular Review had been, and still is, debating the future of interdisciplinary and international study at the College. Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby, who has long been a proponent of international study in the new curriculum, said in the March press release that the residency had come “at just the right moment.”

The dates of the first stage of the residency were set for September 26 to October 1, but little else was set in stone. The press release announced a determination to “cooperate on the development of new interdisciplinary curricula in the arts, literature, history, and music of the Silk Road regions.” Such a program was markedly more open-ended and potentially all-encompassing than previous artistic residencies, such as that of the Ying String Quartet, which has held residency at Harvard since 2001.

Jack Megan, head of the Office for the Arts at Harvard (OFA), says that the SRP’s residency “is one of the most significant” in Harvard history, and that it differs from most residencies in that “there will be many types of engagement over an extended period of time.”

In addition, as Dean for the Humanities and Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures Maria Tatar puts it, “This is really an FAS initiative, not a departmental one.” The SRP, according to the press statement, was explicitly interested in taking “the scope of audience participation beyond the mainstream concert tour format” and delving deeper into Harvard culture.

Taken as a whole, all of these statements and mandates leave the door open for the SRP to become a rare campus presence: one that interacts with multiple departments, attempts to examine thousands of years of history and culture, and traverses the boundary between the curricular and the extra-curricular.

But what will the residency actually, concretely do? Although the Harvard community got an exciting glimpse last week, the question remains open.

HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS

By the time the nine performers of the Ensemble arrived in Cambridge last week, a packed schedule had been planned. But as the events of the week would show, there was still plenty of room for improvisation.

The first major event was a Tuesday morning visit to Watts Professor of Music and member of the Committee on Ethnic Studies Kay K. Shelemay’s course, Literature and Arts B-78, “Soundscapes: Exploring Music in a Changing World.” Shelemay, an ethnomusicologist, wrote about the SRP in her book, “Soundscapes” and has been a vigorous supporter of the residency ever since it was proposed.

According to Shelemay, the Ensemble played for the class, had brunch with the students, and discussed the Silk Road. “Our theme this semester is music and mobility,” Shelemay says, “and [the Silk Road] is the perfect case study.”

Student response was enthusiastic. “What surprised me was the level of improvisation” says Rebecca A. Gong ’08. “It was just amazing…it was almost as if they were dancing onstage while performing.”