The Vietnam War, the latest documentary project by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, features new music arranged and performed by Grammy Award-winning cellist Yo-Yo Ma and The Silk Road Ensemble. It is the first time Burns and Novick with Ma and The Silk Road Ensemble.

The name Yo-Yo Ma should be familiar – a child prodigy from the very beginning, Ma graduated from both Juilliard School and Harvard University, and went on to have a prolific career that has amounted to over 90 albums, 18 Grammys, a National Medal of the Arts, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1998, Ma initiated Silkroad (formerly known as the Silk Road Project), a non-profit arts and education organization dedicated to instigating multicultural collaboration between artists and institutions around the world. One part of Silkroad is The Silk Road Ensemble, a musical collective consisting on an unfixed group of as many as 59 musicians, composers, arrangers, visual artists and storytellers from Eurasian cultures. Combining Western instruments (cello, viola and violin), with a range of instruments from across Asia, including the bawu and the kamancheh, they improvised variations on a number of themes, some inspired by Vietnamese music.

While music by Yo-Yo Ma and The Silk Road Ensemble has appeared in other films by Burns and Novick, including The War, this is the first time the musicians have composed, arranged, and recorded original music for Florentine Films.

Given their previous experience together, Burns was more than delighted to have Yo-Yo Ma and The Silk Road Ensemble on board with his 10-part series. “Collaborating with Yo-Yo Ma and The Silk Road Ensemble was one of the great joys of this enormous project. We have admired their work for years, and it was a dream come true to be in the studio with them. The beautiful and devastating music they created for the film truly is beyond category,” said Burns.

Novick added to Burns’ sentiment: “Yo-Yo Ma and Silk Road are some of the greatest musicians working in the world,” said Novick. “The luminous music they made for the film gives voice to something deep within us, something universal and ineffable.”

Ma had to this to say about working on this epic project: “My wife and I eagerly anticipate each new Florentine Films series because we know that it will inform and transform our understanding of the world. So to be invited into the creative process, and to witness how they realize their work was a privilege for the Silk Road Ensemble and for me. The earnest curiosity and deep empathy that Ken, Lynn, and Sarah Botstein bring to their subjects is reflected in the films they make, and it was a joy to collaborate with and learn from them.”

Listen to some work by Yo-Yo Ma and The Silk Road Ensemble here: 

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