Quote

The role of the musician is to go from concept to full execution. Put another way, it's to go from understanding the content of something to really learning how to communicate it and make sure it's well-received and lives in somebody else.

Yo-Yo Ma

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Yo-Yo Ma
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: October 7
Actor
Cellist
Composer
Music Pedagogue
Musician
Paris
France
Yo Yo Ma
YoYo Ma
Wells
Learning
Received
Well
Somebody
Concept
Something
Full
Content
Really
Sure
Communicate
Way
Understanding
Concepts
Make
Lives
Musician
Else
Role
Another
Roles
Execution

More quotes by Yo-Yo Ma

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Nobody else can make the sound you make.
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Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also.
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I play an instrument that has four strings, and I'm still trying to get it right. What I've tried to do in the process of playing these four strings is to try and understand the people I meet, the stories they have to tell. And then become an advocate for them and their stories through music.
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When you learn something from people, or from a culture, you accept it as a gift, and it is your lifelong commitment to preserve it and build on it.
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When people ask me how they should approach performance, I always tell them the professional musician should aspire to the state of the beginner.
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I realized late in life that my twin passions are music and people.
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In performance, we have a greater purpose. The greater purpose is that we're communing together, and we want this moment to be really special for all of us. Because otherwise, why bother to have come at all? It's not about proving anything. It's about sharing something.
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I think that peace is, in many ways, a precondition of joy.
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The tango is really a combination of many cultures, though it eventually became the national music of Argentina.
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After reaching 50, I began to wonder what the root of life is.
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Once something is memorable, it's living and you're using it. That to me is the foundation of a creative society.
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You go through phases. You have to reinvent reasons for playing, and one year's answer might not do for another.
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Music is one of the ways we can achieve a kind of shorthand to understand each other.
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Sound is ephemeral, fleeting, but some sort of a physical manifestation can help you hold on to it longer in time. I'm sure of this I've always thought the sound that you make is just the tip of the iceberg, like the person that you see physically is just the tip of the iceberg as well.
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I think one of the great things about being a musician is that you never stop learning.
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This middle age thing is a little weird. Some friends and mentors are gone, and there's a very forward-looking new generation coming up behind me. So it's very much finding my own place.
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The tradition of classical music and the opera is such that it used to be the place where social intercourse could take place between all parts of society: politicians, industrialists, artists, citizens, etc. That tradition, I think, still exists, but it's much, much more diluted.
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People will ask, 'Are you famous?' And I always answer, 'My mother thinks so.'
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One of the things I love about music is live performance.
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I think of a piece of music as something that comes alive when it is being performed, and I feel that my role in the transmission of music is to be its best advocate at that moment.
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