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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Yo-Yo Ma Quotes

I think anybody who goes away finds you appreciate home more when you return.

– Yo-Yo Ma

My job as a performer is to make sure that whatever happens in a performance lives in somebody else, that it’s memorable… If you forget tomorrow what you heard yesterday, there’s really not much point in you having been there – or me, for that matter.

– Yo-Yo Ma

I think one of the great things about being a musician is that you never stop learning.

– Yo-Yo Ma

I think that peace is, in many ways, a precondition of joy.

– Yo-Yo Ma

A composition is always more than the sum of its parts. In other words, a really good piece of music is more than itself. It’s sort of like a prism, which you can see from each facet a single totality.

– Yo-Yo Ma

With every year of playing, you want to relax one more muscle. Why? Because the more tense you are, the less you can hear.

– Yo-Yo Ma

I think all musicians have at one time or another experienced one physical problem or another. I have had tendinitis a couple of times, so I try to be really careful. It takes patience and persistence to overcome injury.

– Yo-Yo Ma

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.

– Yo-Yo Ma

One of the things I love about music is live performance.

– Yo-Yo Ma

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.

– Yo-Yo Ma

One of the most interesting aspects of the film project was collaborating with so many people – directors, filmmakers, and writers – over a five-year period. I learned that there are two components to this.

– Yo-Yo Ma

You go through phases. You have to reinvent reasons for playing, and one year’s answer might not do for another.

– Yo-Yo Ma

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.

– Yo-Yo Ma

Good things happen when you meet strangers.

– Yo-Yo Ma

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

When we have a good balance between thinking and feeling… our actions and lives are always the richer for it.

– Yo-Yo Ma

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.

– Yo-Yo Ma

It took me way beyond what I knew, into places of which I was totally scared, but as I became less frightened, I welcomed new ways of thinking and approaching something. It made me an infinitely richer person, and I think a better musician.

– Yo-Yo Ma

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.

– Yo-Yo Ma

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.

– Yo-Yo Ma

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.

– Yo-Yo Ma

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.

– Yo-Yo Ma

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.

– Yo-Yo Ma

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.

– Yo-Yo Ma

Passion is one great force that unleashes creativity, because if you’re passionate about something, then you’re more willing to take risks.

– Yo-Yo Ma

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.

– Yo-Yo Ma

Music is powered by ideas. If you don’t have clarity of ideas, you’re just communicating sheer sound.

– Yo-Yo Ma

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.

– Yo-Yo Ma

After reaching 50, I began to wonder what the root of life is.

– Yo-Yo Ma

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.

– Yo-Yo Ma

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