January 30, 2005. By Gerri Hirshey
I think one of the best lessons that I received from my parents is to have the ability to understand the world beyond yourself,” says Yo-Yo Ma. “Since my parents were immigrants, they knew a number of different worlds. There’s always an awareness that you’re a part of things much bigger than yourself.”At 49, Ma—ceaseless world traveler, musical ambassador and the greatest cellist on Earth—has been called “the Marco Polo of music.” He has played for bushmen in the Kalahari Desert, for Carnegie Hall connoisseurs and with indigenous artists from Iran, Mongolia, South Korea, China and Azerbaijan. He has recorded albums with Appalachian fiddlers, an Argentinian tango guitarist and a tabla drummer from India.
While he has hardly turned his back on classical music—Ma has recorded more than 50 albums, which have garnered 16 Grammys—for the last four decades, raging curiosity and a deep sense of musical mission have propelled him far from the cosseted atmosphere of a classical conservatory. When asked what sends him out there, he explains: “So much of human expression is longing. You’re trying to go toward something—some sort of vision. As parents, as human beings, as citizens, we’re always trying to think, ‘Where is our country? Where is the world? What could it be? What are the little things we can do that could actually move things in a good way?’”I caught up with him in a concert hall at the University of Southern California in L.A., where students have created short films inspired by Ma’s recordings of movie music by Italian composer Ennio Morricone. One selection is “Ecstasy of Gold” from The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. A spaghetti Western? Ma smiles and insists: “Playing what you want, where and when you want, is what being a musician is about. It’s trying to do things that are meaningful.”For Ma, this also can mean helping Elmo with a tough violin note on Sesame Street. As a tireless advocate of children’s involvement with music, he says he also loved wearing a bunny suit to josh with kid-lit favorite Arthur the aardvark. And he admits, “I’ve always had mischief in my soul.”His is a vastly different temperament from that of his serious, scholarly father. Dr. Hiao-Tsiun Ma, a classical music teacher, escaped political and cultural unrest in China by emigrating to Paris in 1936. There, he married another émigré, Marina Ma, born Ya-Wen Lo, a mezzo-soprano. “My father was in Paris when the Nazis marched in,” says Ma. “My parents went through huge swaths of unstable times, both in China and in Europe. So I think I was always aware of how fragile things were and how easily things were destroyed.” The family, which also included Ma’s older sister, Yeou-Cheng, was traditional and close-knit; the children were home-schooled—in music, French, Chinese and piano. Yo-Yo (whose name means “friendship” ) was provided with a child-sized cello at age 4 and learned difficult pieces with his father’s innovative techniques. “With the Bach suites, I was asked to learn two measures a day, which is doable,” he says. “After a month you do know the whole thing—without huge pain.”Yet Yo-Yo’s natural abilities stunned his successive cello teachers. In 1961, when Dr. Ma moved his family to New York City, the music world embraced his two prodigies. Yo-Yo was only 7 when he stood before 5000 people in Washington, D.C., in 1962 with Yeou-Cheng on piano and played for President Kennedy and the First Lady; in 1964, the Ma children played Carnegie Hall. In New York, Ma also went to school for the first time and began to question the “normalcy” of his childhood. Inevitably, there came a time when he had to break with Dr. Ma’s strict orthodoxy. In his mid-teens, he had a difficult conversation with his father. “You know, in the traditional Asian way, you’re supposed to be very obedient and not talk back,” Ma explains. “Monologue vs. dialogue. I said, ‘If you want me to be really obedient, I can do that, but it means absolutely not finding my own voice. If you want me to be a good musician, it means I have to go deeply into myself to find out.’”He got his chance in 1971, when he was 15 and away from home for the first time at Meadowmount music camp in upstate New York. Wendy Rose, now a violinist with the Toronto Symphony, was a fellow camper. She recalls a moment when Yo-Yo did begin to find his own voice: “I heard Yo-Yo playing the Franck sonata, and I burst into tears. The sheer beauty of his playing was totally overwhelming. I just couldn’t stop crying.”Ma remembers it as a turning point too. “I just started playing my heart out,” he says. “You’re 15. You’ve got a lot of feelings inside. From that moment on, it’s been a continuing process.”For Ma, this meant engaging with life beyond the concert hall; rather than turn professional at 17, he went to Harvard. “I just wanted to experience life,” he says. “I knew that the cello that I played was totally and intimately connected to life. It’s not like you get better just by practicing. You can get better by knowing the world better, figuring things out. And then having something to say.” At 23, Ma married Jill Hornor, a Harvard instructor he’d met at a summer music festival when he was 16. The future should have been bright. Instead, recalls Ma, “Jill signed on to a wreck.”In 1980, doctors told Ma that the surgery required to correct his severe scoliosis (a sideways curvature of the spine) might result in nerve damage that would leave him unable to play the cello. The sense of life’s fragility had never been more overwhelming, but he met it head-on. “I remember thinking, ‘OK, if I never play the cello again, I’m fine,’” he says. “In some ways, it was freeing. Because you kind of say, ‘Well, OK, done that,’ and move on.” Ma was in a cast for six months after the surgery. He emerged intact—and two inches taller.As his performances made him a world traveler, Ma indulged his curiosity about other cultures and nonclassical music. And in 1998 he founded the Silk Road Project, dedicated to preserving and performing music from peoples along the ancient “Silk Road” route that spanned from Asia to the Roman Empire. Ma calls it “the Internet of Antiquity,” since the trade route sent silk, spices, jade, art, music—even some of the first stringed instruments—between East and West. He chose the project’s slogan: “When strangers meet.” Meet they did—in worldwide symposiums, concerts and festivals. But since 9/11, Ma’s cultural diplomacy has been fighting for its soul. “Almost the next month after September 11th, the ensemble was asked to go to Syria to play,” recalls Ma. “And we went. Have I thought about giving it up? Absolutely. Just the fund-raising, the visas. Some days it seems impossible.” Yet, concert by concert, he persists. “It’s a recommitment every day,” Ma says. “Is it worth it? Can we do it?”In the end, he answers the big questions with the smaller, human stories. “We have a Mongolian singer, Zola [Khongorzul Ganbaatar], who sings long songs,” he says. “A long song is this incredible vocal style, really loud and spectacular. She’s the eldest of many children. There had been a huge drought in Mongolia, where over a million herd of cattle died, followed by a horrible winter. We knew how important Zola’s music was to the whole support of her family. We know that while these awful things are happening, people are trying to live their lives and do—of all things—music.”So they went on tour. Zola’s long songs electrified American audiences. In such moments, says Ma, the visa problems, the terrorist threats, the security issues fade. And the dividends are priceless. “If we find a way to make it happen, we all go back to our profession much better musicians. And better human beings. We’re stronger for acknowledging that we’re interdependent. By sharing what you know with me, you’re not less. You’re more.”As global tensions increase, Ma still finds inspiration in his parents’ lesson. “Everything is fragile,” he says. “I think you hope that we all want to go toward a bigger place than self-interest. Being self-centered goes against the flow of natural human activity, which is trying to understand the larger world.” So when strangers meet, it’s bound to be a good thing? The beatific Ma grin reappears. “I have yet to meet a tradition that wasn’t enhanced by interacting with others.”
Give a Child a "Voice"
Yo-Yo Ma’s children—Nicholas, 21, and Emily, 19—are both musical. “Both play piano,” he says. “My daughter also plays violin, my son sings.” He was thrilled when Emily discovered his beloved Dvorak and Brahms. But he cautions parents against pushing too hard. “Music was always around our children, but it wasn’t force-fed,” he says. “They had to own it. For them it will always be their own discoveries.” At a time when many public schools are cutting back on music education, I ask Ma about the benefits of being involved with music at a young age. He directs his answer to an awestruck 12-year-old cellist sitting nearby—my daughter. And it contains the secret of his own inner peace: “If you love some instrument, if you like the sound of it, it’s like no other sound. It’s really yours. It comes from deep within, and it’s something you can always connect with inside. How good can that be? Your music, your sound—it’s your friend for life. You can express how you feel, send your self into the larger world. You will always have that voice. That’s a pretty powerful thing.”
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