Best quotes by Yo-Yo Ma on Music

Checkout quotes by Yo-Yo Ma on Music

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

  - Yo-Yo Ma
  

• ‟ 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.

  - 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ Mastering music is more than learning technical skills. Practicing is about quality, not quantity. Some days I practice for hours; other days it will be just a few minutes.

  - Yo-Yo Ma
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Yo-Yo Ma
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Yo-Yo Ma
  

• ‟ I realized late in life that my twin passions are music and people.

  - 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
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Yo-Yo Ma
  

• ‟ The tango is really a combination of many cultures, though it eventually became the national music of Argentina.

  - Yo-Yo Ma
  

• ‟ 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.

  - 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also.

  - Yo-Yo Ma