Rhode Island, U.S. – Student Workshop & RISD Residency, March 4, 2009
An hour-long performance workshop for Rhode Island middle- and high school students began when Wu Tong and Kojiro Umezaki processed into the RISD Auditorium playing Wandering Winds, an improvised duet on the Chinese bawu and Japanese shakuhachi, both bamboo flutes. The Silk Road Ensemble with Yo-Yo Ma then launched into Mountains Are Far Away (a piece the Silk Road Project commissioned in 2004 from Iranian kamancheh player Kayhan Kalhor) before beginning a conversation with the audience of approximately 500 students and teachers from Providence, Central Falls, Woonsocket and Pawtucket.
Percussionist Shane Shanahan taught students the basic rhythm of his percussion piece Saidi Swing, and mugham vocalists Alim Qasimov and Fargana Qasimova joined the Ensemble for Kor Arab and Shikasta, two songs demonstrating vastly different mughams, or modes. When students had opportunities to ask questions, they probed into the backgrounds of the Silk Road Ensemble musicians, asking about their musical training and how they had begun collaborating, how much of their music was improvised and how their improvisations together had developed over the years. The workshop closed with a surprise for students, as their teachers were asked to join the Silk Road Ensemble onstage for some on-the-spot improvisation as part of a vocal percussion piece called Vocussion, which had the students erupting into applause.
This workshop was a culmination of a semester of Silk Road-inspired lessons in several Rhode Island schools. Thanks to the presenting organization FirstWorks, the students had previously received a study guide based on the Silk Road Project's Along the Silk Road
curriculum. Earlier in the year, Silk Road Ensemble member Yang Wei had also visited four of the participating schools to play pipa and speak with students.
After the workshop, the Ensemble headed to a talk with recent Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) alumnus Henrik Soderstrom, who had worked with the Ensemble in a previous residency at RISD and had recently designed the set for the new multimedia chamber arrangement of Layla and Majnun the Ensemble was premiering in the U.S. during its North American tour. Soderstrom described his goal of articulating the immense sense of separation between the two protagonists in visual terms and his detailed process of creating the paintings that are projected during the performance. Also with him was fellow recent RISD graduate Francesca Lohmann, whose hand-painted calligraphy was used for the onstage libretto. Silk Road Ensemble musicians played excerpts from Layla and Majnun, giving the RISD students in attendance a behind-the-scenes look at this new work.
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