Yo-Yo Ma conceived Silkroad in 1998 as a reminder that even as rapid globalization resulted in division, it brought extraordinary possibilities for working together. Seeking to understand this dynamic, he recognized the historical Silk Road as a model for cultural collaboration – for the exchange of ideas, tradition, and innovation across borders.

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Kodak Hall Series: Silkroad Ensemble with Rhiannon Giddens

Eastman Theatre

Grammy Award-winning musical ensemble Silkroad’s Uplifted Voices brings together a stellar lineup of performer-composers from the Silkroad Ensemble in a series of pieces that highlight each artist’s musical storytelling. These compositions, often inspired by their homeland, ancestors, community, and family, represent previously under-recognized voices from around the world, offering a fresh perspective on the history and migration of music.

Silkroad Ensemble

Field Arts & Events Hall

The Silkroad Ensemble’s new program, Uplifted Voices, shines a light on previously under-recognized voices to change our perspectives on the history and migration of music. Audiences will be led on a musical journey that connects the music of indigenous North America to the world, drawing inspiration from folk and ancestral music of Japan, China, Armenia, Ireland and the Hebrides, and native populations across North America.

Artist Recital Series: Silkroad Ensemble—Uplifted Voices

Oberlin College

Under the leadership of 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner, the dynamic multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens, the Grammy-winning, genre-defying Silkroad Ensemble embarks on a new initiative that illuminates the impact of under-recognized voices in America’s expansion west. The project explores the creation of the Transcontinental Railroad through the contributions of African American, Chinese, Irish, Indigenous, and other communities, their cultures, and their music. Chinese traditional instruments like the guzheng, pipa, erhu, and qinqin are contrasted with the fiddle, bones, tambo, and banjo of Black musical traditions, and their Indigenous and Celtic counterparts. New compositions and commissions weave these disparate traditions together to tell a new version of the American story. As Giddens told the New York Times, “Silkroad has people from all over, and that’s what makes it such a great group to represent the American story, because that’s what the American story is. We are world music”.

American Railroad Silkroad Ensemble with Rhiannon Giddens

University of California, Berkeley

American Railroad highlights the cultural diffusion and collaboration that resulted as African American, Chinese, Irish, and Native American communities made vital contributions to the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. Under the leadership of Artistic Director Rhiannon Giddens, the Grammy Award-winning Silkroad Ensemble recontextualizes the railroad through the sounds of the worlds that collided through its creation.

American Railroad

Stanford University

Silkroad’s newest initiative, American Railroad, illuminates the impact of African American, Chinese, Irish, and Native American communities on the creation of the Transcontinental Railroad and America’s Westward Expansion. Exploring the dissemination of cultures across the United States, the railroad was to North America what the Silk Road was to China, the Far East and Europe.

American Railroad: Silkroad Ensemble With Rhiannon Giddens

Soka Performing Arts Center

As a social-impact organization and home to a Grammy Award-winning musical ensemble, Silkroad works to inspire collaboration in innovative ways that add more equity and justice into the world through the power of the arts. Today, under the leadership of Artistic Director Rhiannon Giddens, Silkroad reaches new heights through a commitment to new music, a re-sparked mission towards cultural collaboration, and a reinvigorated focus to high-quality arts education that both reflects its mission and the times in which we live.

Silkroad Ensemble with Rhiannon Giddens

Balboa Theatre

Under the leadership of Pulitzer Prize-winner Rhiannon Giddens, the Silkroad Ensemble embarks on a new initiative, American Railroad, that reflects the profound impact of the railroad and the immigrant communities that built it on the cultural fabric of North America.

Granada Theatre

What happens when the natural order of things is upended? Falling Out of Time is a new work from the Grammy Award-winning composer Osvaldo Golijov performed by an ensemble of musicians, including some members of the Silkroad Ensemble, led by violinist Johnny Gandelsman. Rooted in David Grossman’s novel of the same name, this infinitely nuanced story in voices narrates a profound journey of grief and solace, a journey “out of time” as parents grieve the death of a child, a quest to comprehend a loss with no name.
It so happens that we all are, as a world, living in a moment in which the “natural” order of things has been upended. More than ever, we are in need of stories that help us make sense of the broken pieces. Falling Out of Time is one such story.

Osvaldo Golijov: Falling Out of Time

The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts

Traversing the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans, Silkroad presents a brand new trio seamlessly blending three disparate narratives of language and sound. Three internationally acclaimed, genre-bending artists who each have been credited with reshaping the landscape of their respective instruments through their unique improvisational styles and compositional voices. 

Hailing from Damascus, Syria, Kinan Azmeh has been taking the international music scene by storm with his unique blending of Eastern and Western styles, bombastic improvisation and large-scale compositions for orchestras such as the New York Philharmonic, the London Philharmonic and the Seattle Symphony. 

Acclaimed composer and instrumentalist Kaoru Watanabe‘s work is grounded in traditional Japanese music while imbued with contemporary jazz, improvisation, and experimental music elements, working with such figures as Laurie Anderson, Jason Moran and André 3000. 

Scottish harper and composer Maeve Gilchrist has been credited with bringing the Celtic harp to new levels of visibility through her unique improvisational and textural approach to the instrument and her collaborations with artists such as from Arooj Aftab, Yo-Yo Ma, The Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Esperanza Spalding.

Silkroad Ensemble

Nov 7, 2026

Silkroad Up Close: Kaoru Watanabe, Kinan Azmeh, and Maeve Gilchrist

Mar 26, 2026

Kodak Hall Series: Silkroad Ensemble with Rhiannon Giddens

Mar 29, 2025

Silkroad Ensemble

Silkroad Ensemble