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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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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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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I think that peace is, in many ways, a precondition of joy.
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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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Our cultural strength has always been derived from our diversity of understanding and experience.
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I realized late in life that my twin passions are music and people.
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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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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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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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When we enlarge our view of the world, we deepen our understanding of our own lives.
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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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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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We may be coming to a new golden age of instrument making.
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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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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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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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Perfection is not very communicative
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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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After reaching 50, I began to wonder what the root of life is.
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