Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble at the Pabst tonight

Yo-Yo Ma will play in Milwaukee tonight (Thursday, Aug. 19) at the Pabst Theater. The world’s most famous cellist has brought some friends, the Silk Road Ensemble. Silk Road is Ma’s noble effort to bring together musicians from many cultures to find common ground. Milwaukee is the eighth stop on the current tour. 2010 is the 10th year of Ma’s Silk Road Project.

The current ensemble of 15 includes violinist Jonathan Gandelsman. We got to know him a little in February, when Frank Almond brought the Brooklyn Rider string quartet to the Frankly Music series. Wednesday, Gandlesman — son of Yuri Gandelsman, the Fine Arts Quartet’s former violist — told TCD about life as a Silk Roader.

He got involved in 2002, on the recommendation of violist Nicholas Cords and violinist Colin Jacobsen, who were in on the original Silk Road summer experiment at Tanglewood. Cords and Jacobsen are colleagues in Brooklyn Rider and on the current Silk Road tour. The three are naturals for Silk Road: They are hugely skilled and open to other cultural influences, qualities reflected in the Brooklyn Rider repertoire and style.

“I’ve been part of the development of a lot of repertoire since 2002,” Gandelsman said. “The learning curve has been tremendous. The Western players have learned to deal with different structures.”

Likewise, musicians from other cultures have learned to organize their ideas in ways that allow them to combine with Western instruments and players. Ma’s fame, prodigious talent and winning personality have attracted musicians eager to find ways to make music together. In some cases, composers have woven cultures together. In other cases, it’s more like an organized jam.

In Milwaukee tonight, Galician bagpiper Cristina Pato will play traditional music with a decidedly non-traditional crew. Likewise, Kojiro Umezaki’s shakuhachi, Wu Tong‘s sheng and bawu, Yang Wei‘s pipa and Sandeep Das‘ tablas will make music along side Ma’s cello, Jon Mendle’s guitar and the other Western instruments. Composer Osvaldo Golijov, whose music often crosses cultural borders, composed a piece just for Silk Road for this tour; he brings everyone together Air to Air.

“These masters have been so generous in bringing us along and giving us a sense of ownership of the music,” Gandelsman said. “They know their own traditions very well, but they are also innovators within those traditions. They feel a need to explore and push boundaries, because that keeps their tradition alive.”

The stretching goes in both directions. Italian composer Giovanni Sollima wrote The Taranta Project for Silk Road.

“We played part of it for Frank’s concert in February,” Gandelsman said. “Sollima is part of that Italian tradition, going back to Corelli, of virtuoso player-composers who pushed the boundaries of possibility on their instruments. Taranta has some crazy cello mayhem for Yo-Yo. It also has folk melodies, modernism, groove, rock and incredible extended techniques. And there’s body percussion.”

The biggest chasm between Western classical tradition and other musical cultures lies in notation. Western composers since about 1400 wrote down pretty much every tone to be played. Elsewhere, musicians learn certain scales and procedures and rhythmic patterns and improvise on them. After 10 years, Silk Road has become very savvy about closing that gap.

“We’re in the middle of our fourth round of commissions,” Gandelsman said. “That’s a great way to expand the repertoire and get to know those instruments. Composers have also written arrangements of music from other cultures. But there’s always plenty of room for freedom, for improvisation.”

Take the case of Caronte, on tonight’s program. Cristina Pato brought the Galician folk song to Silk Road with a sketch for how an arrangement might work. Colin Jacobsen, Gandelsman’s Brooklyn Rider colleague and one of Silk Road’s go-to arrangers, developed her ideas further. Then…

“During the first couple of days, we all kind of arranged it together,” Gandelsman said.

“Our mission is to take something that is precious to someone else and to respect it and to meet it. The most important thing we’ve learned is how to listen to one another.”

Some tickets remain for the Silk Road concert at the Pabst Theater, 144 E. Wells St. Note the start time: 7 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 19. Tickets are $55.50 to $130 at the Pabst box office, 414 286-3663 and at the Pabst website.