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You must have a reason to be in the places to which you go, and you must do only things that you really care about.

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
Places
Care
Reason
Must
Really
Things

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Many of the Central Asians know Russian, and Ted Levin speaks it fluently. I speak Chinese, but Mongolian is completely different, so we had to have translators.
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We may be coming to a new golden age of instrument making.
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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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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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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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As a musician I'm kind of nomadic, Waldo-like. I show up in different places, and I'm witness to unbelievable things.
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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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Nobody else can make the sound you make.
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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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One of the marks of a great teacher lies not only in an ability to impart knowledge but also in knowing when to encourage a student to go off on his own.
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I realized late in life that my twin passions are music and people.
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After reaching 50, I began to wonder what the root of life is.
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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 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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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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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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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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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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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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