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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.

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
Care
Cares
Music
Garden
Must
Figures
World
Existence
Community
Easy
Toronto
Part
Talks
Doe
Represents

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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Music has always been transnational.
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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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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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Perfection is not very communicative
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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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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 think one of the great things about being a musician is that you never stop learning.
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When you learn something from people, or from a culture, you accept it as a gift, and it is your lifelong commitment to preserve it and build on it.
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When we enlarge our view of the world, we deepen our understanding of our own lives.
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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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One of the things I love about music is live performance.
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Passion is one great force that unleashes creativity, because if you're passionate about something, then you're more willing to take risks.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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