Quote

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.

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
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Alive
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Moment
Transmission
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Our cultural strength has always been derived from our diversity of understanding and experience.
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I think that peace is, in many ways, a precondition of joy.
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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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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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Music is one of the ways we can achieve a kind of shorthand to understand each other.
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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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Music has always been transnational.
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When your heart and your mind are engaged, you cannot go wrong.
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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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After reaching 50, I began to wonder what the root of life is.
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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 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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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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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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My teacher, my great cello teacher Leonard Rose, was such a great cellist, and nurturing man, very patient. But I grew up not only admiring him, but obviously Casals, Rostrotovich, Jacqueline du Pre, and many others, including many of my peers and contemporaries.
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Perfection is not very communicative
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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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Music is powered by ideas. If you don't have clarity of ideas, you're just communicating sheer sound.
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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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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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