A message from the Executive Director

Dear Friends,

As William Carlos Williams reminds us, pressed with the demands of time and constrained by the tasks of the moment, we pay a high price for failing to attend to the truths that the humanities reveal.

This year the Silk Road Ensemble is exploring the intersections of music, art and poetry, and stories that reintroduce us to age-old questions about space and time, about what a human being is and is not.

A few years ago, Ensemble member Alim Qasimov asked us to consider adapting one such story, “Layla and Majnun,” that has since captured Yo-Yo’s imagination. This classic Arabian tale of ill-fated love has permeated Central Asian music and literature, but has been largely unknown in the West. Vividly portraying the ecstasies of love and heartbreak of separation, the story has inspired Turkish, Persian and Indian artists since the seventh century.

When Uzeyir Hajibeyov’s opera Leyli and Majnun premiered almost 100 years ago in Azerbaijan, the composer asked that the doors and windows of the opera house be opened so that hundreds of people on the street who had been unable to get tickets could hear.

This year, we were all excited to open the doors and windows of cultural exchange once again, this time over thousands of miles and across cultural and national boundaries, as we shared “Layla and Majnun,” the Ensemble’s new interpretation of this work, with audiences in France and the United States that had never heard the story or experienced the power of mugham music.

While it has been compared to Romeo and Juliet, a play familiar to Western audiences, “Layla and Majnun” is a very different love story. Both mystical and religious, the tale is ultimately about a journey of the soul to another world.

The Ensemble’s performance reminded me once again of how important it is to continue to cultivate my own humanity. Experiencing this work in progress in its many incarnations has helped me to gain insight into Muslim culture, an understanding that I have been struggling to find for years within the daily news accounts, but for which I had clearly been looking in the
wrong places.

Warm regards,
Laura Freid