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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: 69
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
Years
Reasons

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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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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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Sharing is a much better way to communicate than proving.
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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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I realized late in life that my twin passions are music and people.
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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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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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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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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 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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One of the things I love about music is live performance.
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People will ask, 'Are you famous?' And I always answer, 'My mother thinks so.'
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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After reaching 50, I began to wonder what the root of life is.
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