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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: 69
Born: 1955
Born: October 7
Actor
Cellist
Composer
Music Pedagogue
Musician
Paris
France
Yo Yo Ma
YoYo Ma
Always
Performance
People
Performances
Musician
Approach
Asks
Beginner
State
Beginners
Tell
Aspire
States
Professional

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After reaching 50, I began to wonder what the root of life is.
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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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Things can fall apart, or threaten to, for many reasons, and then there's got to be a leap of faith. Ultimately, when you're at the edge, you have to go forward or backward if you go forward, you have to jump together.
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Music has always been transnational.
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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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Nobody else can make the sound you make.
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I think that peace is, in many ways, a precondition of joy.
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I realized late in life that my twin passions are music and people.
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One of the most interesting aspects of the film project was collaborating with so many people - directors, filmmakers, and writers - over a five-year period. I learned that there are two components to this.
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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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Good things happen when you meet strangers.
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When we enlarge our view of the world, we deepen our understanding of our own lives.
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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 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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The tradition of classical music and the opera is such that it used to be the place where social intercourse could take place between all parts of society: politicians, industrialists, artists, citizens, etc. That tradition, I think, still exists, but it's much, much more diluted.
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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 think anybody who goes away finds you appreciate home more when you return.
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One of the things I love about music is live performance.
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Perfection is not very communicative
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