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Music is one of the ways we can achieve a kind of shorthand to understand each other.

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
Music
Kind
Way
Shorthand
Achieve
Ways
Understand

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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 child, you respond physically, tactically. You're delighted by sound, you're delighted by recognizing something. It's like hide and seek. Is it there? Is it not there? Is it this note? Is it not this note? It's one fantastic game.
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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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One of the things I love about music is live performance.
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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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A Senegalese poet said 'In the end we will conserve only what we love. We love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.' We must learn about other cultures in order to understand, in order to love, and in order to preserve our common world heritage.
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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 people pick up whatever interests them, and certainly a lot of classical music has absorbed influences from all over the world.
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As you begin to realize that every different type of music, everybody's individual music, has its own rhythm, life, language and heritage, you realize how life changes, and you learn how to be more open and adaptive to what is around us.
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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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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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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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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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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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Culture opens our hearts to one another. And the currency in culture is not money, but trust.
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I think the purpose of a piece of music is significant when it actually lives in somebody else. A composer puts down a code, and a performer can activate the code in somebody else. Once it lives in somebody else, it can live in others as well.
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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.
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We may be coming to a new golden age of instrument making.
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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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I have yet to find something that beats the power of being in love, or the power of music at its most magical.
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