A musical courtship is under way in Carnegie Hall. From a giant video screen hanging above the stage, a girl from China's Miao hill tribe stares into the distance, singing to an audience she can only imagine. Usually the girls in her remote southwestern village sing this song while walking in the mountains; its piercing intensity is designed to carry far enough to reach the ears of potential suitors in the next valley who, if favorably impressed, will respond with songs of their own and, ultimately, offers of marriage. But here in New York City's great concert hall, the reply to her overture comes from the cello of Yo-Yo Ma. He listens, eyes shut and eyebrows raised, to each line of her high-pitched call, then plunges his bow to answer in peals of sonorous, throaty yearning.

The performance is vintage Ma: conceptually innovative, culturally rangy, and executed with flawless, stirring beauty.

Precisely the qualities that make him the world's favorite cellist. This long-distance duet is also evidence of Ma's fascination with his roots—one reason why China's Chinese claim this Chinese-American celebrity as their own.

Born to Chinese parents living in Paris, Ma was the ultimate prodigy. He gave his first concert at age 4; was hailed as a virtuoso when his peers were still sucking their thumbs; and by adolescence, then living in New York City, had blazed his way into comparison with the likes of Casals and Rostropovich. But unlike so many in his profession, he refuses to let his classical renown constrain him. He has performed for the Muppets on Sesame Street, recorded albums with Argentine tango bands and even traded tunes with bushmen in the Kalahari. In short, he's made sure his Stradivarius lives up to the last three syllables of its name. Says composer Tan Dun, with whom Ma collaborated on the Oscar-winning soundtrack to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the matchmaker behind the Miao virtual duet: "Yo-Yo can do things with his cello that no one else can. When he plays Mongolian music, for example, it sounds more Mongolian than Mongolian music itself."

Now the 47-year-old Ma is fiddling with the Silk Road Project, an organization he founded to explore the musical currents and cultural interdependence of countries along the ancient Central Asian trade routes. The group commissions works by composers representing 10 countries (including China, Turkey and Uzbekistan) and oversees performances of this new repertoire by a comparably international ensemble of traditional and classical musicians. This month the orchestra plans to make its first concert tour of Central Asia.

The vision for the Silk Road Project grows out of the time-honored notion of music as a universal language. If a Chinese musician understands that his erhu (Chinese fiddle) is a descendant of the Arab oud, Ma believes, maybe he'll be able to more readily embrace his connection to another culture. In an increasingly globalized world, we have information about one another, Ma says, "but how can we actually feel that, yeah I know you, I feel like we've met before?" Playing the music of other cultures is as enriching as travel, says Ma: "Every time I go away from something that I grew up with, I come back practicing more because my ears are cleaner. After Brazilian rhythms, I suddenly go back to Haydn and think, I can get a groove there and I've never thought about it. I've rushed through this part for the 30 years I've played this piece."

In the hands of a mediocre musician or a duller mind, what Ma calls "exploration" might descend quickly into hokeyness. But under Ma's leadership, the Silk Road Project has attracted first-rate musicians, commanded large and diverse audiences and received richly deserved critical acclaim. He has played a crucial role in introducing non-Western music into establishments closed to all but the most canonical classical works. Audiences trust Ma, and that enables him to sell tickets for concerts that fans of classical music might otherwise skip. To the Asian musicians in the Silk Road ensemble, Ma is a mentor and a role model. Wu Man is a virtuosic pipa (Chinese lute) player who became close to Ma after he invited her to perform a work by Chinese composer Bright Sheng at a White House dinner for then Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji. She says her performances are in much higher international demand since she started collaborating with Ma. "Ma is like a big brother to us," says Wu. "He's the greatest communicator I have ever met. He is able to use his music to create connections between people, and teaches us to listen to each other better both as musicians and human beings."

The musicians in the Silk Road collective have the confidence to make strange new sounds because Ma's personal humility and low-key approach to his own celebrity make them feel safe. If on stage he has the aspect of a medium, a kind of human lightning rod channeling the tremendous power of the music he plays with superhuman force, in person he is disarmingly warm and easygoing. At a gathering to celebrate the opening of the Silk Road Project's new offices in Manhattan, he's the one pouring the drinks and handing out the snacks. Until recently, New York City taxis played a message from Ma reminding passengers to take their belongings with them and joking about the time he accidentally left his 300-year-old Montagnana cello in the trunk of a cab. (It was eventually returned.) Wu Tong, a Beijing musician who plays the sheng (mouth organ) in the Silk Road ensemble, recalls that when he got lost on a mountain road on his first trip to the Tanglewood Music Festival in rural Massachusetts, it was Ma who, at 2 a.m., drove out to find him.

It may well be this very ordinary side of Ma that allows him to respond to the Miao girl's song with such extraordinary emotion. When Tan Dun recorded the girl's singing, he told her to imagine that her song had to travel as far away as she could fathom. "All the way to Beijing?" she asked. "To the other side of the earth," replied Tan, "where there is a beautiful musician who plays as beautifully as you sing. Imagine you're playing to him, and that he plays back to you." When she finished singing, she said, "I hope I can see this musician someday." Back in the U.S., the composer played the tape for Ma. The first words out of the cellist's mouth, recalls Tan, were: "I hope I can meet this girl and play with her."

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