Quote

With every year of playing, you want to relax one more muscle. Why? Because the more tense you are, the less you can hear.

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
Every
Muscle
Years
Tense
Muscles
Relax
Playing
Hear
Year
Less

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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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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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One of the marks of a great teacher lies not only in an ability to impart knowledge but also in knowing when to encourage a student to go off on his own.
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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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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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We may be coming to a new golden age of instrument making.
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My involvement in the political arena is to make sure there's a place for culture.
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I have yet to find something that beats the power of being in love, or the power of music at its most magical.
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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'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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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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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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I think one of the great things about being a musician is that you never stop learning.
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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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After reaching 50, I began to wonder what the root of life is.
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Passion is one great force that unleashes creativity, because if you're passionate about something, then you're more willing to take risks.
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I really would like to be involved in things and to understand things, and in some ways you've got to be careful what you wish for because I feel very, very blessed to have such an interesting life and to be able to have little snapshots of lives of people from many different parts of the world.
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There's a part of me that's always charging ahead. I'm the curious kid, always going to the edge.
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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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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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