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
Think
Moment
Transmission
Thinking
Comes
Advocate
Moments
Performed
Best
Piece
Music
Role
Feel
Pieces
Feels
Roles
Something
Alive

More quotes by Yo-Yo Ma

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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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In performance, we have a greater purpose. The greater purpose is that we're communing together, and we want this moment to be really special for all of us. Because otherwise, why bother to have come at all? It's not about proving anything. It's about sharing something.
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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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The tango is really a combination of many cultures, though it eventually became the national music of Argentina.
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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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Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also.
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I realized late in life that my twin passions are music and people.
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When we enlarge our view of the world, we deepen our understanding of our own lives.
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I think that peace is, in many ways, a precondition of joy.
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We may be coming to a new golden age of instrument making.
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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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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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One of the most interesting aspects of the film project was collaborating with so many people - directors, filmmakers, and writers - over a five-year period. I learned that there are two components to this.
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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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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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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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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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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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I have yet to find something that beats the power of being in love, or the power of music at its most magical.
Yo-Yo Ma