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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.
Yo-Yo Ma
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Yo-Yo Ma
Age: 68
Born: 1955
Born: October 7
Actor
Cellist
Composer
Music Pedagogue
Musician
Paris
France
Yo Yo Ma
YoYo Ma
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Professional
Always
Performance
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Performances
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Beginner
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Aspire
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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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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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Music has always been transnational.
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One of the things I love about music is live performance.
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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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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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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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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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Culture opens our hearts to one another. And the currency in culture is not money, but trust.
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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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Music is powered by ideas. If you don't have clarity of ideas, you're just communicating sheer sound.
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With every year of playing, you want to relax one more muscle. Why? Because the more tense you are, the less you can hear.
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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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I want to investigate different cultures, to see how their identities and values affect their music. It's one way I can get to know our world, at least to a certain depth.
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I think anybody who goes away finds you appreciate home more when you return.
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When we enlarge our view of the world, we deepen our understanding of our own lives.
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My involvement in the political arena is to make sure there's a place for culture.
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I realized late in life that my twin passions are music and people.
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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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