Quote

One is that you have to take time, lots of time, to let an idea grow from within. The second is that when you sign on to something, there will be issues of trust, deep trust, the way the members of a string quartet have to trust one another.

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
Time
Grows
Lots
Within
Sign
Idea
Members
Another
Deep
Ideas
Second
Quartet
Take
Grow
Quartets
Something
Trust
String
Way
Issues
Strings

More quotes by Yo-Yo Ma

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With every year of playing, you want to relax one more muscle. Why? Because the more tense you are, the less you can hear.
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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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Music has always been transnational.
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Bach takes you to a very quiet place within yourself, to the inner core, a place where you are calm and at peace.
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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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My teacher, my great cello teacher Leonard Rose, was such a great cellist, and nurturing man, very patient. But I grew up not only admiring him, but obviously Casals, Rostrotovich, Jacqueline du Pre, and many others, including many of my peers and contemporaries.
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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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When we enlarge our view of the world, we deepen our understanding of our own lives.
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As a musician I'm kind of nomadic, Waldo-like. I show up in different places, and I'm witness to unbelievable things.
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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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The thing that I've always been slightly frustrated with, was that the idea of a CD is kind of confined to a material possession that you can put on a shelf. And the idea of music, for me, is always about both the communication and the sharing of content. And so the interactive part is missing.
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After reaching 50, I began to wonder what the root of life is.
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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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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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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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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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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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Classical music is one of the best things that ever happened to mankind. If you get introduced to it in the right way, it becomes your friend for life.
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One of the things I love about music is live performance.
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