“Silk Road was such a metaphysical term until I traveled through Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. It sounded far and magical, hard to grasp. Where people from Asia and Europe traveled and exchanged their cultures, I witnessed genuine interaction and creation of their encounters many, many centuries before me. As a western instrumentalist, little did I know the violin and Asian cellos like the Erhu and Haegeum, had the same ancestor until I saw another violinist playing the instrument between legs like a cello. Among many familiar sounding yet exotic instruments, the most memorable was a Mongolian cello called Morin Khuur. It had a magical balance between the folk-like sounds that we hear in Asian cellos and the sensitivity we recognize in the violin or viola. A horse head scroll was attached to its trapezoid box…a captivating, odd beauty which fit perfectly with one of my favorite legends it’s inspired: After a mother camel gave birth to her newborn, she was stressed and exhausted. She rejected the newborn and refused to feed the calf. To restore the harmony between …