Nashville-based composer and guitarist Bryan Clark was surprised when he became the first Western artist inducted into the Chinese Cultural Heritage Guild. "It seemed like the irony of ironies," Clark tells the Scene. "I mean, it was an honor, but who would have guessed that a communist country like China would have a union?"
Clark received his unexpected union card because of the extraordinarily fruitful musical partnership he's forged with Ma Xiaohui, one of China's foremost instrumentalists. Recently, Ma and Clark performed together in Shanghai for a televised Chinese New Year's special, which was seen by hundreds of millions. That New Year's broadcast, along with a sold-out performance at the prestigious Shanghai Concert Hall (China's equivalent of Carnegie Hall), all but assured Clark's inclusion in the guild.
Nashvillians will get the chance to see this dynamic duo in action on Thursday night, when they join the musicians of chatterbird and the dancers of the Chinese Arts Alliance of Nashville for a performance at the W.O. Smith Music School. The program will include, among other things, the world premiere performance of From Rivers to Ocean, Clark's new piece for the unlikely combination of erhu, Dobro, chamber ensemble and electronics. Ma will remain in town over the weekend, presenting a free workshop titled "The Healing Power of Music" at the Nashville Public Library.
Ma's celebrity status in China is due to her mastery of the erhu, an ancient Chinese string instrument known for its melancholy sound. For centuries, the erhu was associated with blind beggars, who relied on the instrument's sorrowful timbre to solicit both sympathy and coins. In recent years, it has gained some pop culture currency, becoming a favorite instrument of female pop stars in Hong Kong and China.
A classically trained virtuoso, Ma introduced the erhu to an international audience in 2000, when she played alongside that other Ma (cello phenom Yo-Yo Ma) on composer Tan Dun's soundtrack for the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In the years since, she has toured the world, playing everything from tangos at the Kennedy Center to Bach in Germany. (Like Béla Fleck on the banjo and Edgar Meyer on the double bass, Ma is one of those instrumentalists who can play anything.)
Clark first met Ma several years ago through her husband, Timothy Kelly, a noted clinical psychologist who once taught at Vanderbilt University. "He was looking for local musicians who could play with Xiaohui," says Clark. "In particular, he wanted someone who was both classically trained and who could improvise, and my name came up. When I finally met Xiaohui, we hit it off immediately."
The collaboration really clicked when Clark decided to pair his Dobro with Ma's erhu. "I don't think those two instruments had ever been played together before," says Clark. "But they sound perfect together, and when we played them in China, we started something of a craze."
The most tangible product of that craze is From Rivers to Ocean. Thursday's performance will include a traditional Chinese dance choreographed by Jen-Jen Lin and the Chinese Arts Alliance of Nashville. This multicultural combination of music and dance will result in a Chinese-opera-meets-Grand-Ole-Opry sort of event.
"From Rivers to Ocean is a crazy, perfect storm of a piece that mixes American minimalism with traditional Chinese culture," says Clark. "East truly meets West in this performance."
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