Quote

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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Yo-Yo Ma
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: October 7
Actor
Cellist
Composer
Music Pedagogue
Musician
Paris
France
Yo Yo Ma
YoYo Ma
Either
Task
Neural
Brain
Connections
Rehearsing
Actually
Tasks
Imagining
Whether
Instruments
Muscle
Others
Forms
Practicing
Form
Memory
Includes
Also
Memories
Muscles
Playing
Instrument

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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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The tango is really a combination of many cultures, though it eventually became the national music of Argentina.
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Sharing is a much better way to communicate than proving.
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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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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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This middle age thing is a little weird. Some friends and mentors are gone, and there's a very forward-looking new generation coming up behind me. So it's very much finding my own place.
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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 learn something not because I have to, but because I really want to. That's the same view I have for performing. I'm performing because I really want to, not because I have to bring bread back home.
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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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We may be coming to a new golden age of instrument making.
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When your heart and your mind are engaged, you cannot go wrong.
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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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What came up at age 49 is I realized that of all the things I'm interested in, the thing I'm most interested in is figuring out what makes people tick, why people think the way they do, why they act the way they do. And I realized that music is such a great way to investigate why people do what they do.
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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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Nobody else can make the sound you make.
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I've been traveling all over the world for 25 years, performing, talking to people, studying their cultures and musical instruments, and I always come away with more questions in my head than can be answered.
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When we enlarge our view of the world, we deepen our understanding of our own lives.
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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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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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