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One of the things I love about music is live performance.

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
Performance
Performances
Music
Live
Things
Love

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I learn something not because I have to, but because I really want to. That's the same view I have for performing. I'm performing because I really want to, not because I have to bring bread back home.
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I don't always have a five-year plan. One thing you must do in life is keep your learning curve as high as possible.
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After reaching 50, I began to wonder what the root of life is.
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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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I've been traveling all over the world for 25 years, performing, talking to people, studying their cultures and musical instruments, and I always come away with more questions in my head than can be answered.
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There are limits to how much sound a cello can make. That's part of the framing of acoustical instruments. Finding what those limits might be, and then trying to suggest perhaps even the illusion of going beyond is part of that kind of effort.
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I think there are so many ways to become interested in music. I believe signs of sustained interest gives a sense of the right time. Music, if thought of as a language, would perhaps indicate that as early as possible is not so bad. I do believe that a really nurturing first teacher that makes the child love something is crucial.
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Music has always been transnational people pick up whatever interests them, and certainly a lot of classical music has absorbed influences from all over the world.
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I think the purpose of a piece of music is significant when it actually lives in somebody else. A composer puts down a code, and a performer can activate the code in somebody else. Once it lives in somebody else, it can live in others as well.
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A Senegalese poet said 'In the end we will conserve only what we love. We love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.' We must learn about other cultures in order to understand, in order to love, and in order to preserve our common world heritage.
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Many of the Central Asians know Russian, and Ted Levin speaks it fluently. I speak Chinese, but Mongolian is completely different, so we had to have translators.
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When we have a good balance between thinking and feeling... our actions and lives are always the richer for it.
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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.
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But an innovation, to grow organically from within, has to be based on an intact tradition, so our idea is to bring together musicians who represent all these traditions, in workshops, festivals, and concerts, to see how we can connect with each other in music.
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Nobody else can make the sound you make.
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