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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.

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
Musician
Including
Composers
Force
Classical
Also
Influenced
Music
Performers
Composer
Obviously
Jazz

More quotes by Yo-Yo Ma

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I want to investigate different cultures, to see how their identities and values affect their music. It's one way I can get to know our world, at least to a certain depth.
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Music has always been transnational.
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Music is powered by ideas. If you don't have clarity of ideas, you're just communicating sheer sound.
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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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My involvement in the political arena is to make sure there's a place for culture.
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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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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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After reaching 50, I began to wonder what the root of life is.
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The worst thing you can do is say to yourself, I want to be just like somebody else. You have to absorb knowledge from someone else, but ultimately you have to find your own voice.
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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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Perfection is not very communicative
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One of the things I love about music is live performance.
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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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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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Our cultural strength has always been derived from our diversity of understanding and experience.
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What came up at age 49 is I realized that of all the things I'm interested in, the thing I'm most interested in is figuring out what makes people tick, why people think the way they do, why they act the way they do. And I realized that music is such a great way to investigate why people do what they do.
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Culture opens our hearts to one another. And the currency in culture is not money, but trust.
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People will ask, 'Are you famous?' And I always answer, 'My mother thinks so.'
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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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