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A virtuoso will be the artistic director of the intercultural exchange organization founded through Yo-Yo Ma.
By Zachary Woolfe
Formed as an opera singer, Rhiannon Giddens is a founding member of Carolina Chocolate Drops, the acclaimed folk group. With chocolate drops and as a soloist, virtuosic violinist and banjo vanity with a poignant voice, she immersed heed in African-American and ancient traditions. He won a MacArthur “Genius” scholarship in 2017 and wrote an opera based on the autobiography of Omar Ibn Said, an Enslaved African Muslim in South Carolina. (His first planned plan was postponed until next year due to the coronavirus pandemic).
You will now have a new global conservation Internet for your gender jumping ideas. On Tuesday, Silkroad, the intercultural music organization created through Yo-Yo Ma in 1998, announced that Ms. Giddens would be her next artistic director.
“I’ve never been interested in ‘Hey, it’s me, I’m making a song a song,'” Giddens, 43, said over the phone from home in Ireland. “I am more: that is the message I want to convey, if I sing it, it will transmit it. So it’s a wonderful opportunity to combine what I’ve done and what they’ve done.”
Silkroad was founded more than 20 years ago as the Silk Road Project, an effort to combine old and new artists and music, cultures concentrated in the old network of industrial routes between East Asia and the Mediterranean. Since then, it has a multifaceted entertainment, education and social justice organization with a budget of more than $3 million, a broader geographic focus and a reputation for presenting very intelligent artists, as well as some confusion about their activities, beyond the undeniable. intelligent intentions.
“These are things I’ve heard, and I thought, “There’s so much skill and beauty, but what exactly are you doing?” said Mrs. Giddens. We have those resources, those musicians. Can we say more? Can we focus more on what we mean? »
One of the demanding situations will be to continue advising Silkroad on the relationship with Mr. Ma, his artistic director until 2017 and until now his greatest vital asset, a superstar who has opened the doors of consultation and recording around the world. “Silkroad will have to exist outdoors as yo-yo, however Yo-Yo is an unalterable component of Silkroad,” Giddens said. “These two elements will have to exist at the same time, and we want to think about how to do it in a way that is pleasing to everyone involved.”
Mr. Ma said Ms. Giddens “is a human being and an ordinary musician.”
“Live the values of Silkroad,” he added, “rooted in history and its many music, and defends fresh voices that can lead us to combined paintings for a bigger world.”
Giddens will become one of the few women of color to hold leadership positions in the music world, noting that her conversations with Silkroad began in February, long before the country was absorbed into discussions about racial equity.
“They saw all those things before it was a national conversation,” she said of Kathy Fletcher, Silkroad’s executive director and the organization’s board of directors. “True diversity is diversity at all levels, and you have to see who walked when no one paid attention.”
Giddens added that her role would be shown as a performer, adding in a Silkroad concert that will be held online from Wednesday to Tanglewood. And he passionately defended the kind of explorations in which the organization specializes, even at a time when the competitive facets of those cultural exchanges have been highlighted – and criticized – as an appropriation.
“Of course there’s a lot of negativity in our history, yet the music that accompanies it is the way our good looks are expressed,” he said. “I think the context is very vital and it’s vital to be ready to communicate where things are coming from, whether it’s Iran or Tennessee. A more complicated understanding of music is a more complicated understanding of history, and that’s what we need. . And I bring a deep dive into the cultural combination that america is.”
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