Talk one

World Maestro

How musicians build a shared language before they agree on anything.

What the room gets

• What happens when musicians do not all share a spoken language, a notation or an approach to tuning, and still have to build something together
• Why an instrument's name often carries migration history that written history lost
• What a conductor must surrender before musicians start listening to one another

Useful well past a music department: global studies, intercultural programs, and anyone running a team that has to decide something across a language gap.

Where it comes from

An Iraqi qanun. An Iranian santur. An Israeli tsimbl. One zither family that left the Middle East, scattered, and grew apart until the people playing it were told they had nothing in common.

It kept going east and became the Chinese yangqin, which means foreign zither. The migration is recorded in the instrument's own name.

That is the name I learned it by, and it taught me something American training never did. A yangqin can drive an ensemble when there is no conductor in the room. So I put that family at the center and built outward.

Hence Pangean. Before the continents drifted there was one. Millennia passed and the differences became reasons to ignore what we shared.

Musicians came from the United States, Ireland, Brazil, India, Japan, Afghanistan and Iraq. Most had never met. We played Phoenix Symphony Hall in 2010. USLOT Films left Los Angeles to document it, and the film opens on Arizona's political fault lines before it introduces a single musician.

I was not making a case about policy. I was making one about music, and you can hear the proof in four bars.