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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
Tell
Aspire
States
Professional
Always
Performance
People
Performances
Musician
Approach
Asks
Beginner
State
Beginners

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One of the things I love about music is live performance.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Good things happen when you meet strangers.
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I think that peace is, in many ways, a precondition of joy.
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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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People will ask, 'Are you famous?' And I always answer, 'My mother thinks so.'
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Music enhances the education of our children by helping them to make connections and broadening the depth with which they think and feel. If we are to hope for a society of culturally literate people, music must be a vital part of our children's education.
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After reaching 50, I began to wonder what the root of life is.
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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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Our cultural strength has always been derived from our diversity of understanding and experience.
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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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I think there are so many ways to become interested in music. I believe signs of sustained interest gives a sense of the right time. Music, if thought of as a language, would perhaps indicate that as early as possible is not so bad. I do believe that a really nurturing first teacher that makes the child love something is crucial.
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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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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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The tango is really a combination of many cultures, though it eventually became the national music of Argentina.
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