Ten years ago, tablas master Sandeep Das knew nothing about the violin, cello or traditions of Western music. Today, he not only understands and embraces these instruments but also composes for them.

He is a member of the Silk Road Ensemble, a collective of Eastern and Western musicians. It was assembled by cellist Yo-Yo Ma in 1998 to study the ways information and technology developed along the Silk Road, which ran from Europe in the West to China in the East. The ensemble became a way to find commonalities in disparate musical forms.

The Silk Road Ensemble will perform tonight at Augusta State University as part of the Westobou festival.

Mr. Das plays a tabla, a hand drum used in traditional and classical Indian music. He doesn't read Western musical notation and wasn't familiar with Mr. Ma before joining Silk Road.

The idea of playing with a group that incorporated both the familiar and alien was initially disconcerting.

"But once you start playing, you find those defenses break down," Mr. Das said in a telephone interview. "You meet at a point where all of you realize that this is similar to what you have always done. Nationality doesn't matter. It becomes about having fun, about giving and taking."

Mr. Ma had performed with both Eastern and Western ensembles and saw relationships that he believed deserved more focused investigation, said Laura Freid, the executive director of the Silk Road Project.

"He had experienced this sort of synergy," she explained. "And he felt like we might all have more in common than we might expect. He is, very much, a renaissance thinker, so I believe his idea of what this could be was always big.

Silk Road has developed from a strictly musical project into a foundation that also focuses on education and cultural programs. Mr. Ma calls the Silk Road staffers "venture culturalists."

Ms. Freid has been with Silk Road since 2004. She said she was attracted to the idea of the program as a humanist metaphor for the exchange of ideas, but has come to love it as a true musical movement.

"I took this position before I saw the musicians in front of an audience playing live," she said. "In my imagination, I couldn't have imagined anything more powerful than these musicians making this music. It's something that has turned out better, much better, than I could have ever expected."

Mr. Das said the magic of Silk Road is not just its approach to composition and the marriage of diverse styles and forms but also the makeup of the ensemble itself. Silk Road members often rotate in and out as the concert and schedules require. Mr. Ma, for instance, will not be performing at the Westobou date.

"But in that way, it is always evolving and always growing," Mr. Das said. "It keeps it fresh. The same piece, played four times, will always sound different."