Can music mean anything at all in a time of great tragedy?
Documentary director Morgan Neville delivers a tour de force film about music and culture in The Music of Strangers. The central character of the film is Yo-Yo Ma, the world famous American cellist and former child prodigy who has received eighteen Grammy awards. The film opens with Ma walking into the frame and sitting down and saying, “This is my cello.” His comic tone of voice and casual demeanor drew a chuckle from the audience, and the film was off to a lighthearted start.
As it progresses, the film’s focus becomes increasingly serious, but the attitude expressed by Ma in the first shot never fully vanishes. There is nothing lighthearted or comical about the moments when the film explores tragedies like 9/11 and the violent revolutions in the Middle East, but the material is treated with sensitivity and humanity.
The film expertly weaves together two main stories. One is the genesis of The Silk Road Ensemble and Ma’s general fascination with diverse cultures and musical traditions. The second is a complex exploration of the purpose of music specifically and of art in general. Fellow Silk Road members Kinan Azmeh, Keyhan Kalhor, Cristina Pato, and Wu Man each come from parts of the world that are suffering some form of cultural crisis and each speaks extensively on their perspective and their relationship with music. These two stories, the one of Ma’s quest to unite the world through music and the one of the global musicians searching for meaning in their art, are inextricably linked and one could not be properly told without the other.
The most powerful narrative crafted by the film is that of the musicians struggling to understand their own relationship to their music. Kinan Azmeh laments the fact that a piece of music cannot save a life or feed someone who is hungry. He wonders if he can justify devoting his life to something that seems so trivial. Wu Man visits different parts of China and encounters musical traditions that are disappearing and may not be passed on to the next generation. Cristina Pato talks about her native Galicia as a place that is ‘economically poor, but culturally rich’ and the duty of each generation to find new ways of carrying on the traditional culture.
Finally, Keyhan Kalhor offers the closest thing the film has to a decisive conclusion. He says, “Nobody remembers who the king was when Beethoven was alive.” What the film intends through the emphasis of this statement is to say that the actions of a government, the laws and courts that we construct, are not what represent our culture. These are not the things that persevere. If anything, they become bumps in the road that slow, but do not halt the advancement of music and real culture. The achievements of human kind that stand the test of time, the expression of what it means to be human, are the music and art that we make. Hearing four incredible musicians, each of whom has been displaced from their native culture and placed into a community of other global musicians, grapple with these age-old questions of the purpose of art has the potential to be dizzying. However, Neville’s superb direction and the articulate thoughts of the musicians make the film accessible, beautiful, and startlingly relevant to our moment in history.
Whether the audience realizes it or not, the film begins subtly constructing this argument about the supreme importance of art to the existence of culture from the very beginning. Throughout the film, quotes from Ma and the other musicians, clips of their performances, archival footage of Ma, and testimonies from those close to the ensemble are intercut with beautifully compiled clips of diverse cultural moments from all over the globe. Suddenly, the film cuts to a service at a mosque, then to a parade in the streets of a Spanish town, then to the setting of the sun over the Manhattan skyline. Everything is music. All of these places contribute their sounds and their noises and their melodies to something that is larger than a government, larger than a religion, larger than an ideology. As Wu Man says in the film, “There is no East or West, there is only a globe.”
The Music of Strangers does not feel like a conclusion or an absolute. Much the opposite, it feels like the initiation of an entirely new conversation about global zeitgeist and culture. It becomes the responsibility of the audience to pick up where the film leaves off and continue the conversation.
The Music of Strangers is directed by Morgan Neville and stars the musicians Yo-Yo Ma, Kinan Azmeh, Keyhan Kalhor, Cristina Pato, and Wu Man.
Photo credits: Deadline.
