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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.

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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More quotes by Yo-Yo Ma

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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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Children, in a way, are constant learners. Certainly sponge-like. Absorbing everything without careful analysis, even though, at the same time, they are certainly capable of incredible insights.
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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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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 think one of the great things about being a musician is that you never stop learning.
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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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Many of the Central Asians know Russian, and Ted Levin speaks it fluently. I speak Chinese, but Mongolian is completely different, so we had to have translators.
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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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One is that you have to take time, lots of time, to let an idea grow from within. The second is that when you sign on to something, there will be issues of trust, deep trust, the way the members of a string quartet have to trust one another.
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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.
Yo-Yo Ma
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It's easy for me to care about Toronto, because Toronto is a community that cares about itself. It represents the world. It talks to itself, and because it does, it figures out that there must be a music garden as part of its existence.
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We may be coming to a new golden age of instrument making.
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After reaching 50, I began to wonder what the root of life is.
Yo-Yo Ma
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Sharing is a much better way to communicate than proving.
Yo-Yo Ma
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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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I realized late in life that my twin passions are music and people.
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Practicing is not only playing your instrument, either by yourself or rehearsing with others - it also includes imagining yourself practicing. Your brain forms the same neural connections and muscle memory whether you are imagining the task or actually doing it.
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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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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Music is powered by ideas. If you don't have clarity of ideas, you're just communicating sheer sound.
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