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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.

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
Performing
Away
Instruments
Come
Musical
Years
Questions
Always
Study
Answered
World
Head
Studying
People
Traveling
Talking
Cultures
Culture

More quotes by Yo-Yo Ma

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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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Our cultural strength has always been derived from our diversity of understanding and experience.
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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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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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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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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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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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Music is powered by ideas. If you don't have clarity of ideas, you're just communicating sheer sound.
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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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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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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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Music has always been transnational people pick up whatever interests them, and certainly a lot of classical music has absorbed influences from all over the world.
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As a musician I'm kind of nomadic, Waldo-like. I show up in different places, and I'm witness to unbelievable things.
Yo-Yo Ma
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I remember when I was growing up. My great wish was to understand who I was and how I fit in the world.
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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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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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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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As a child, you respond physically, tactically. You're delighted by sound, you're delighted by recognizing something. It's like hide and seek. Is it there? Is it not there? Is it this note? Is it not this note? It's one fantastic game.
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One of the things I love about music is live performance.
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Perfection is not very communicative
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