The Carnegie Hall Fellows Program, sponsored by the US Department of State, seeks to broaden cross-cultural dialogue and exchange through touring activities in specific global regions. The final phase of this season's yearlong project was a tour by the San Francisco-based Phoenix Quartet to this year's selected territory, Central Asia.
(The Phoenix String Quartet—Susie Babini, Ryan Mooney, Joe Meyer and Michelle Maruyama—on
the tarmac of Bukhara airport in Uzbekistan)
The Phoenix were the second Carnegie Fellows participants to tour Central Asia this season, and their tour proved to be a great success on a multitude of levels. We would like to give enormous thanks to our colleagues at the US Embassies in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan for all their enthusiastic support of this program and for sharing with our groups their insights on cultural diplomacy.
This program provides comprehensive training in many details of touring life for the professional musician. Participants learn how to prepare engaging programs and how verbally to communicate with their audiences. The groups learn how to construct lecture/demonstrations and how to give master classes to young students of varying levels. They acquire the skills to conduct intelligent interviews for radio and television and discover how to help create an effective press conference. The program also allows them to discover the difficulties of traveling from point A to point B and the stamina that is required on a day-to-day basis while touring.
(The Kalon gate and Minaret in Bukhara, Uzbekistan)
What made the Phoenix Quartet's basic experience all the more interesting and challenging was that their professional training took place in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. This enhanced their overall professional experience, as they were required to interact in a society notably different from their own while taking on the responsibility of functioning as cultural "ambassadors."
During the course of the tour, many types of musical exchange were initiated in addition to standard concert performances, master classes, and workshops. The Phoenix had an opportunity to reach out to smaller schools and rural communities; perform with local musicians; make donations of gifts such as sheet music, string instrument supplies, and music stands; and introduce central Asians to American repertoire that had never been performed in the region. Their tour included numerous meetings with people of the cultural community, with academics interested in American culture as well as with local diplomatic communities.
The Phoenix had the chance to assimilate a wide variety of aspects of central Asian culture in a relatively short period of time, including musical practices in the tradition of Western European classical music, regional folk music, and national popular music. Taking in stunning nature, architecture, and arts were also part of their tour program. They savored national dishes, learned some local customs, and, in some cases, even picked up some polite local phrases.
(Joe teaching a young violinist at the Abdraev School in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan)
In Kyrgyzstan, the Phoenix covered a large amount of rural territory along with some major cities. In addition to working in the capital, Bishkek, they traveled to the ancient Silk Road city of Osh and drove through, as well as performed in, more remote communities surrounding the breathtaking Lake Issyk-Kul. It was in this territory that the quartet experienced their first encounter with true poverty&mdahs;an area where some people subsist on as little as $400 per year.
(Michelle in Dungan dress in Karakol, Kyrgyzstan)
While Kyrgyzstan was a favorite because of its incredible physical beauty and the hospitality of the Kyrgyz, Kazakhstan was a musical high point of the tour. This was in part due to its excellent schools and particularly because of the partnership with another Carnegie Fellows group, the KazNAM Quartet (now Al Farabi). In addition to the modern capital Astana and former capital Almaty, the Phoenix traveled to the country's second largest city Karaganda, which has physically changed very little since the Soviet era. Surprisingly it was in cold, gloomy Karaganda that the quartet gave their best performance of the tour to a hall filled with hundreds of people who had extensive knowledge of classical music. In Astana the quartet joined forces with the Al Farabi in the last movement of Shostakovich's Octet, which they played as an encore at their concert to a thrilled audience. In Almaty they had several opportunities to work with and assist young talented musicians who have very little exposure to the American approach of music making.
(Onstage with our Kazakh colleagues after the performance in Astana, Kazakhstan)
The final week of the tour took place in Uzbekistan, which from a historical perspective the quartet found to be the most impressive country of the entire tour. Despite the dismal, politically oppressive environment, Tashkent is still a vibrant cultural capital in Central Asia. It was there that the Phoenix performed three concerts to capacity audiences. They were pleasantly surprised by the fine standard of playing in the local conservatory and musical college in Tashkent, where they gave workshops and master classes. Their cultural tour of Uzbekistan included a trip to Bukhara, the quiet ancient city where the musicians enjoyed shopping in covered markets and walking up the famous Kalon Minaret also known as "The Tower of Death." Everyone agreed that the most impressive city of the entire tour was the mystical city of Samarkand, where the quartet performed in a church/gallery surrounded by fine arts and crafts. In Samarkand, the Phoenix managed to see some of the world's most impressive ancient architecture in mosques, mausoleums, and madrassahs.
(The Mir-i-Arab maddrassah in Bukhara)
The central Asian tour encompassed a vast geographical territory, and the quartet met a wide variety of people from different communities. One constant, however, was the fact that they were uniformly received with great hospitality and were met with genuine respect and interest. As our colleagues at the US embassies repeatedly noted, it is through mutual respect and active exchange that cultural diplomacy can achieve long-term effects. The Phoenix Quartet, who had previously traveled very little outside of North America, not only gained some fundamental skills for their musical careers on this tour but also learned the great value of cultural exchange. Their impressions will surely stay with them a long time. Following are their own personal day-to-day accounts of their experience.
-- Lee-Ann Pinder
BEGIN
|
