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

More quotes by Yo-Yo Ma

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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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Music is powered by ideas. If you don't have clarity of ideas, you're just communicating sheer sound.
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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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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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Practicing is not only playing your instrument, either by yourself or rehearsing with others - it also includes imagining yourself practicing. Your brain forms the same neural connections and muscle memory whether you are imagining the task or actually doing it.
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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.
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As you begin to realize that every different type of music, everybody's individual music, has its own rhythm, life, language and heritage, you realize how life changes, and you learn how to be more open and adaptive to what is around us.
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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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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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Children, in a way, are constant learners. Certainly sponge-like. Absorbing everything without careful analysis, even though, at the same time, they are certainly capable of incredible insights.
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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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The tango is really a combination of many cultures, though it eventually became the national music of Argentina.
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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 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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I think one of the great things about being a musician is that you never stop learning.
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You must have a reason to be in the places to which you go, and you must do only things that you really care about.
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People will ask, 'Are you famous?' And I always answer, 'My mother thinks so.'
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When we enlarge our view of the world, we deepen our understanding of our own lives.
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