Quote

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.

Yo-Yo Ma

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TAGS & TOPICS

Yo-Yo Ma
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: October 7
Actor
Cellist
Composer
Music Pedagogue
Musician
Paris
France
Yo Yo Ma
YoYo Ma
Game
Recognizing
Child
Note
Games
Physically
Sound
Respond
Children
Hide
Something
Fantastic
Like
Notes
Tactically
Seek
Delighted

More quotes by Yo-Yo Ma

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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 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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Perfection is not very communicative
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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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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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Each day I move toward that which I do not understand. The result is a continuous accidental learning which constantly shapes my life.
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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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My involvement in the political arena is to make sure there's a place for culture.
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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 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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Good things happen when you meet strangers.
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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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There are limits to how much sound a cello can make. That's part of the framing of acoustical instruments. Finding what those limits might be, and then trying to suggest perhaps even the illusion of going beyond is part of that kind of effort.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Music enhances the education of our children by helping them to make connections and broadening the depth with which they think and feel. If we are to hope for a society of culturally literate people, music must be a vital part of our children's education.
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