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Perfection is not very communicative

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
Communicative
Perfection

More quotes by Yo-Yo Ma

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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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The thing that I've always been slightly frustrated with, was that the idea of a CD is kind of confined to a material possession that you can put on a shelf. And the idea of music, for me, is always about both the communication and the sharing of content. And so the interactive part is missing.
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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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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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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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We may be coming to a new golden age of instrument making.
Yo-Yo Ma
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I think that peace is, in many ways, a precondition of joy.
Yo-Yo Ma
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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.
Yo-Yo Ma
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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.
Yo-Yo Ma
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Sharing is a much better way to communicate than proving.
Yo-Yo Ma
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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.
Yo-Yo Ma
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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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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.
Yo-Yo Ma
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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.
Yo-Yo Ma
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Nobody else can make the sound you make.
Yo-Yo Ma
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I think one of the great things about being a musician is that you never stop learning.
Yo-Yo Ma
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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.
Yo-Yo Ma
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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.
Yo-Yo Ma
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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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Good things happen when you meet strangers.
Yo-Yo Ma