Having just returned from New Zealand—and having been in transit from Auckland to the WOMAD festival in New Plymouth on the day the Christchurch massacre happened—Cristina Pato is understandably reluctant to discuss how it felt to perform in the aftermath of tragedy. But as a member of the Silkroad Ensemble, an intercultural chamber orchestra formed by cellist Yo-Yo Ma in 1998, she’s not at all hesitant to talk about how music can help erase racial and religious barriers.

“When you are performing with Silkroad, which embraces many different civilizations and ways of understanding music—from classical music to folkloric music, or from traditions from China to traditions from Syria—it makes you able to step towards others,” she tells the Straight, phone from her New York City home. It’s a move that’s enriching because the instrument she plays, the Galician gaita, or bagpipes, is often seen as an endangered species, confined exclusively to the northwest corner of Spain.

“Before I started working with Silkroad, somehow my musical conversations were usually connected to the musical traditions that were part of the Iberian Peninsula’s cultural identity,” she says, “so I would either lean towards the music of the north of Spain, the centre of Spain, or the south, and maybe a little bit of Mediterranean music.”

Her mind, she suggests, has been expanded. “The Chinese suona, for example, is a folkloric instrument from China, and it has a sound that is very similar to the chanter of the Galician bagpipe. Before, I could not see the connection between Chinese music and Galician music, and now all of a sudden I hear that sound in pretty much every tradition I’ve encountered with Silkroad. So you start to go deeper in questioning where is your cultural identity rooted, and how many arms you can find.

“Arms is not the right word,” she adds, laughing. “I guess it would be roots: how many roots you can connect with what you would consider your own culture.”

Since moving to New York from Spain, Pato has been exploring the indigenous music of her adopted country: jazz.

“I cannot fake being a jazz musician,” she says modestly. “But I can surround myself with amazing jazz musicians who can help me make a connection between the two worlds that I come from: classical music and folkloric music.

“To me, the power of folkloric instruments is that they make you vibrate; they connect on a deep emotional level that is impossible to explain,” she continues. “I think people either cry or weep or laugh every time I play the gaita, and you don’t get that as easily when you just sit at the piano and start playing a classical sonata.

"That, to me, is the most powerful thing about being a bagpiper, and jazz somehow gave me enough freedom to be able to bring that into an eloquent conversation that is a little bit more structured than what I was used to in the folkloric tradition.”

The Cristina Pato Quartet plays the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on April 11.