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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.

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
Core
Inner
Quiet
Takes
Within
Peace
Place
Bach
Music
Calm

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I realized late in life that my twin passions are music and people.
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I think that peace is, in many ways, a precondition of joy.
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Once something is memorable, it's living and you're using it. That to me is the foundation of a creative society.
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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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When we have a good balance between thinking and feeling... our actions and lives are always the richer for it.
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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.
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I love grocery shopping when I'm home. That's what makes me feel totally normal. I love both the idea of home as in being with my family and friends, and also the idea of exploration. I think those two are probably my great interests.
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After reaching 50, I began to wonder what the root of life is.
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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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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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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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We may be coming to a new golden age of instrument making.
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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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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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The worst thing you can do is say to yourself, I want to be just like somebody else. You have to absorb knowledge from someone else, but ultimately you have to find your own voice.
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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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I remember when I was growing up. My great wish was to understand who I was and how I fit in the world.
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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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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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