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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.

Yo-Yo Ma

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Yo-Yo Ma
Age: 68
Born: 1955
Born: October 7
Actor
Cellist
Composer
Music Pedagogue
Musician
Paris
France
Yo Yo Ma
YoYo Ma
Answer
Playing
Answers
Year
Another
Reason
Reinvent
Might
Phases
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Reasons

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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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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 think that peace is, in many ways, a precondition of joy.
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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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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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Music has always been transnational.
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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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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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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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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 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 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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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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When your heart and your mind are engaged, you cannot go wrong.
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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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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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Things can fall apart, or threaten to, for many reasons, and then there's got to be a leap of faith. Ultimately, when you're at the edge, you have to go forward or backward if you go forward, you have to jump together.
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Perfection is not very communicative
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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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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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