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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.

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
Speaks
Central
Chinese
Levin
Completely
Mongolian
Speak
Fluently
Many
Asians
Different
Translators
Russian

More quotes by Yo-Yo Ma

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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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Perfection is not very communicative
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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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There's a part of me that's always charging ahead. I'm the curious kid, always going to the edge.
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Our cultural strength has always been derived from our diversity of understanding and experience.
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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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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 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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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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Classical music is one of the best things that ever happened to mankind. If you get introduced to it in the right way, it becomes your friend for life.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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One of the things I love about music is live performance.
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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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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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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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The tango is really a combination of many cultures, though it eventually became the national music of Argentina.
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