The music of when strangers meet

Legendary cellist Yo-Yo Ma (third from left), founder of the Silk Road Ensemble, and Morgan Neville (center), director of the film The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble pose for a group photo with film crew and ensemble members at a screening of the film on Monday at City Cinema in New York. PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY

Everyone's heard the cliché that music is a universal language, reaching across boundaries of culture and race, stirring the primal emotions we all share.

But just how does that actually work?

For the past 16 years, celebrated cellist Yo-Yo Ma has been shepherding a real-time global experiment to probe the mystery in a unique way.

It's called The Silk Road Ensemble and it grew out of a bold idea — gather together 50 master musicians from the lands along the ancient trade route connecting China with the Mediterranean and see what happens.

What one scholar called "the Manhattan Project of music" took place in Lenox, Massachusetts, in 2000 and the outcome is chronicled wonderfully in a new documentary film opening in New York on Friday: The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma & The Silk Road Ensemble.

It's a whole lot more than your father's run-of-the-mill concert film. And the music, as Ma put it, is just the tip of the iceberg.

First there are the instruments that, while centuries or more old, had probably never before been juxtaposed in a jam session — a Chinese pipa (4-stringed lute), a Persian kamancheh (sort of a lap fiddle), an Arabic oud (a 11-to-12-stringed lute), a clarinet from Syria, a Galician bagpipe from northern Spain (yes, they have bagpipes in Spain), Indian tabla (bongos), Armenian double-reed duduk, and so on, all anchored by Ma's mighty cello.