NEW RIVER GORGE NATIONAL PARK, W.VA.- A hiker’s mouth dropped when she learned why a small group was forming at a rocky overlook here. “Yo-Yo Ma,” she was told, “is going to do a pop-up concert.”
She waited patiently, leaning against a wooden guardrail, beyond which lay a serenely undulating vista of West Virginia’s tree-covered mountains, bisected by a horseshoe curve of the New River and dotted with the shadows of scattered clouds. From this spot, Grandview, the landscape appeared nearly untouched, interrupted only by a railroad track along the water.
Members of the National Park Service set up a tripod to livestream the performance. Poet Crystal Good stood before the crowd of a few dozen passers-by, and before giving a reading, said, “Let me take a moment, because this is so beautiful.” Then Ma, far from any major concert hall and hundreds of miles from his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, stood with his cello propped up by its endpin and played a Bach Sarabande.
He continued with the straightforward melody of “Simple Gifts,” followed by “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Wind rustled the surrounding leaves, and as if on cue a bird flew out from a tree. Ma finished, paused to take in the view, then hugged Good, prompting applause for her. He looked out again and said: “Congratulations to you all. It’s yours. It’s yours.”
The audience, so casually assembled, didn’t know that it was taking part in Ma’s latest project, Our Common Nature, an intentionally broad and searching initiative that explores ways in which we can heal, and enrich, our relationship with the world around us. It has taken him to the Grand Canyon and Acadia National Park, to the Great Smoky Mountains and Hawaii. As it expands beyond national parks, he hopes that it will also lead to Antarctica. And, for a few days in September, it brought him to the coal-rich Appalachians of West Virginia.
In classical music, concepts like this have been handled with mixed success. Given the industry’s sometimes oblivious treatment of the environment and Ma’s lofty ideals, cynics might be quick to roll their eyes at Our Common Nature.
Yet it’s convincing simply because of Ma. Aside from being the most famous cellist alive, he is a musician of immense conscience, a wholeheartedly earnest presence who tends to bring out the best in whatever company he is in, who soothes in moments of national mourning or global isolation. And now, with a philanthropic spirit and an open mind, he is hoping for nothing less than to newly understand his, and our, place in the world.
“Culture is able to look at the macro universe and the micro universe and bring it back to a size that we can see, feel, touch and analyze,” he said. “What if there’s a way that we can end up thinking and feeling and knowing that we are coming from nature, that we’re a part of nature, instead of just thinking: What can we use it for?”
THROUGHOUT OUR COMMON NATURE, Ma, 67, has acted more like a wrangler than a star. Each installment of the project, which he funds personally and through fundraising, has a team behind it that handles the logistics — and, crucially, the cello — and finds local collaborators.
In West Virginia, Ma’s colleagues brought together a group that included farmers, artists, miners, teenagers and, of course, musicians. Performances took up a fraction of the visit; Ma spent most of the time talking with those people, learning from them and offering what he could in return.
“There are people that actually use culture to strengthen their community everywhere, as these people and musicians have,” Ma said. “There are wonderful people everywhere, and I want to meet them.”
This can come as a surprise to those people. When Ma traveled to the Grand Canyon, among those invited were Native American composer Raven Chacon, this year’s winner of the Pulitzer Prize for music, and his colleague Michael Begay, along with two of their students.
“We were really excited, of course,” Chacon said, “but I personally had a lot of questions about what exactly we would be doing.”
Begay remembered feeling an instinct to protect his students, and to a degree himself: “our capacity there, being Indigenous.” But his, and Chacon’s, worries disappeared once they met Ma. Together, they hiked a remote trail and discussed their personal histories, and that of Native Americans in the region. They talked about music, how it is approached from a European or Diné Nation perspective. Begay remembered it all being “very laid back,” and added about Ma, “He was intrigued and engaged with everything, especially with wanting to connect with the canyon.”
The group eventually arrived at a ledge, where an elder prayed, a Hopi musician performed and Ma sight-read scores the students had brought, as well as works by Chacon and Begay.
“So much of this can be extractive,” Chacon said. “But there was a reciprocal sharing of knowledge.” And, he noticed, there weren’t cameras recording it.
“We imagine this place being a place where humans don’t go, not to mention the cello,” Chacon said. “But he wanted to play into the canyon, whether it resonated or not. He was not doing it for a photo op; he was doing it to see what it would sound like.”
Ma’s sound was more intentional at Acadia National Park in Maine, a visit for which composer Anna Clyne had written “In the Gale,” a piece inspired by Emily Dickinson’s “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” that documented and facilitated a musical dialogue with the environment. With audio engineer Jody Elff, her husband, Clyne recorded bird song and the flapping of wings in the garden of their home in the Hudson Valley. They then did the same with Ma’s cello, to create layers that would accompany him as he played live.
“This sense of conversation was very important,” Clyne said. “Having a conversation between mankind and nature, and listening to each other.”
In practice, and out of the confines of a concert hall, she added, the music blurred the lines between audience members and participants — the 20 or so people who stumbled upon the performance.
“It was such a genuine expression of artistry.”
One that has lingered with her. Field recordings, and the Dickinson poem, have since been featured in her piece “Perched,” and she has transcribed bird song for a new work that the Philadelphia Orchestra will premiere at Bravo! Vail next summer.
Lasting effects are central to Our Common Nature.
“A cultural relationship, to me, is not a transaction,” Ma said. “It never ends, and it’s based on trust. They gave the best of themselves, the people we met. And I tried to give the best of myself. I will not only talk and think about the place and people we’ve met, but we will actively try and continue these relationships.”
That can take the form of continuing correspondence, or, as he promised the teenagers in West Virginia, an annual video call. But it can also be more intangible, and unexpected. Participants described sharing their experiences with Our Common Nature repeatedly; some, brought together by the project, have reunited elsewhere. It is, as Good, the poet, said, “like a wake, a vibration that just continues.”
GOOD WAS INITIALLY SKEPTICAL of Ma’s visit to West Virginia.
“I’ve been burned by people going in and coming out of the region,” she said, protective of the home that inspires her poetry and the newspaper she founded, Black by God. Her reply to an invitation from Ma’s team included the line: “Good stewards of our precious biodiversity — the history and future of our stories and place — must always be on watch for invasive species.”
“Now that I’ve met Yo-Yo Ma,” she said, “I can’t believe I sent that.”
In addition to helping Ma’s team with local connections and ideas, Good attended nearly every event; she gave readings, one while wearing branded socks from Tudor’s Biscuit World, a beloved West Virginia chain. Most of the participants gathered on the first night for an idyllic outdoor dinner at Lost Creek Farm, a small operation run by Mike Costello and Amy Dawson that specializes in preserving and spreading the area’s culinary history.
Before the meal — whose attendees included Zora Stroud, the first Black woman to retire from the nearby Maple Meadows coal mines — Ma practiced a piece called “Lost River Blues” with Dom Flemons on banjo. Together they improvised and traded tips. Good got to know Kathy Mattea, the Grammy Award-winning musician, and found that they had a richly shared heritage.
Ma gave an impromptu concert, his deeply felt double stops accompanied by the sounds of cows in the distance, insects, birds and the crackle of an outdoor stove. Nearly everyone recorded on their phones, and members of the Lost Creek team cried. Flemons, Mattea and Good joined in the performance; as she was preparing to leave, Stroud said, “I enjoyed every minute.”
The next day was more of a whirlwind, beginning with the concert at Grandview. Thinking about it later, Ma said he was particularly struck by the railroad tracks along the New River, which is one of North America’s most ancient.
“Humanity exists as part of the environment,” he added. “We know that those tracks carried the coal from West Virginia that fueled our Industrial Revolution. So I see, within the mountains and the rivers that are millions of years old, human activity put within a big context of time.”
In the moment, however, Ma was quickly shuttled to the old mining community of Nuttallburg, at the bottom of the gorge. Chairs had been laid out in a circle, and lunch — with nostalgic specialties like pepperoni rolls, Moon Pies and RC Cola — was distributed to a group that included current and former coal miners.
As the river’s rapids churned loudly nearby, they discussed mining labor, as well as the area’s immigrant history; those pepperoni rolls, for example, are the product of a large Italian community that goes back over a century and includes Tony Basconi, whose grandfather arrived in 1910. Near the end, Ma asked what they would like him to tell his friends at home.
“Coal miners, we’re proud people,” Basconi said. “We do something we love. We’ve got a beautiful state and nice people. They just need to look at it.”
Accompanied by Mattea’s guitar, everyone sang the unofficial anthem of West Virginia: John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”
It wasn’t the last spontaneous performance of the song that day; people everywhere seemed to know its tune and words, even its well-intended misunderstanding of the state’s geography.
During the lunch, teenagers from the after-school support program Step by Step were hiking nearby; Ma, as scheduled, met them at the end, telling them, “You know, every forest has a musician” before playing a quick concert and asking them about what they saw on the trail. One student had a question for him: How did he become the best cellist?
“If you say what you’re thinking and feeling, you’re good,” Ma said in reply. “There’s no best in music, as long as you know what you want to say and you say it clearly.”
From there, the students boarded buses for a white-water rafting trip with interludes from the park’s scientists. The mood was playfully competitive and cheerful, even as the weather turned cold.
Matthew Evans, a high school senior who plays trumpet, bravely socialized through chattering teeth after his raft took a plunge with him in the front row and left him soaked right as the sun was retreating behind the mountains.
But there was a reward as they paddled to shore and saw Ma there, playing his cello on the sandy riverbank. More of a surprise, however, was when he put on a life vest and joined one of the rafts. Michael Farmer, a pastor who works with Step by Step, said of Ma: “He’s such a down-to-earth person, him being part of it didn’t seem like it was out of place.”
Throughout the day, Ma had been filled with wonder at the sight of nature, but he seemed most animated reflecting on the connections he had made — through, he said, culture.
“I think it basically opens worlds for the mind and for the heart,” he added. “Culture is not trying to get you to do something. It’s trying to do something. It’s trying to get you to understand the other and be at one with the other, to be communal.”
And that’s how the evening ended. The rafters arrived at a barbecue dinner that evolved into something like an open mic night, complete with a singalong of “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” At one point, Ma stood up and gave a brief speech.
“I came as a stranger, and I hope, I pray, that I’m leaving a friend,” he said. “That’s because you have all been so welcome. You let me know your community, and that’s what we all are. I have friends in all of you. In music, in culture, when you start a relationship, you never break it. I’m sure we will never forget this.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
