Yo-Yo Ma

QUICK FACTS

• born in Paris
• moved to New York when he was 5
• graduated from Juilliard School of Music and Harvard
• has honorary doctorates in music at both Harvard and Princeton
• has made over 80 albums and won 17 Grammy Awards, including a Latin Grammy, along with many prestigious music awards including the National Medal of the Arts
• has played on movie soundtracks including that of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (2000) and Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)
• performed on the site of the WTC in 2001 and at the Olympics in Salt Lake City in 2002
• has performed for Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy (1962), and Obama (2009)
• created the Silk Road Project in 1998 to put into cultural exchange musicians from various countries
• USDS CultureConnect Ambassador since 2002
• UN Ambassador of Peace since 2006
• on the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities since 2009

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Yo-Yo Ma was surrounded by music from a young age: his father was a music professor and his mother a mezzo-soprano singer. They had both immigrated from Mainland China and met in France, living there through WWII and later settling in New York City in 1961.

Ma was homeschooled by his parents. As a toddler he wasn't feelin' the violin and promised his parents to stick with the cello at about age six, and by the age of eight had already played at the White House for President JFK and debuted in Carnegie Hall along with his sister (on piano).

But Yo-Yo believes that he only really started playing at age 15, when after many years of being an obedient student of music/Chinese son, he went to a music camp and first really connected with his instrument through his own musical voice. As he says for his own son and daughter: "They had to own it [the music]. For them it will always be their own discoveries." Discovery, exchange, and crossing different genres of international music is Yo-Yo Ma's work. He learned from his parents, who lived through times of political unrest in both China and France, that "everything is fragile."

After many years of training at Juilliard, he decided that he wanted to study in an undergraduate program before beginning his career and did that in anthropology at Harvard. Since then, he has done an incredibly wide spectrum of projects, from Bach to Bernstein to Appalachian waltzes, and stretched the boundaries of classical music like no other.



Globally-minded, always ready to "experience the world," and believing that "music has always been transnational," he founded the Silk Road Project in 1998 to bring together musicians and likewise the music & culture from countries that were once all connected by the Silk Road. In his 2001 interview with Strings Magazine, Ma explains a little bit of the process:

"We did a lot of field work; Ted Levin and others went to Central Asia, China, and Mongolia, located composers, listened to their works, and just yesterday we heard more compositions from Armenia, Turkey, India, Pakistan, Japan, and Korea...we asked 16 people to write pieces, and last summer, we invited about 60 musicians to Tanglewood...They came from Iran, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, China, and Mongolia, but many master performers can also be found in Toronto, Chicago, and San Fransisco, and there is a large contingent in Queens, NY. However, they keep up a strong tradition of their native music, even though, like many emigrants, they often have to do other things to make a living."

In the past two decades, the Silk Road Ensemble has performed around the world, and its innovative, unity-promoting work has earned Yo-Yo Ma the title of Ambassador of Peace from the UN. He has pretty much become the most well-known cellist in not just the US, China, or France, but the whole world.

The Silk Road Ensemble in Chicago, exploring Chinese music, including Muslim music!

Yo-Yo performing at Obama's inauguration in 2009

In his PBS Faces of America interview, Yo-Yo discusses his concept of home. On the topic of China as "the primal home," he charmingly goes on a tangent about anthropology and the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert. On home in general, he says this:

"For me, home was wherever my family was, and in fact, family of origin when I was growing up, and now obviously my wife and children, that’s home, but I think home meant a number of different things psychologically also...as a young kid I sort of made a decision saying, 'I don’t want to choose! I liked the places that I’ve been, there’s certain things that I appreciate more than others and so I kind of made it my business in life in some ways not to choose and actually to partake in all these different kinds of home.'"

And he has certainly done that!


Left: Yo-Yo, his wife Jill Hornor, and their daughter
Right: Yo-Yo and his son with Mr. Rogers
(Yo-Yo has also appeared on the children's show Arthur, but I am still on the hunt for a screencapture from that episode!)

Elaborating on a theme of "interdependence" in the creation of his music, Yo-Yo says:

"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. Everything is fragile. 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 human activity, which is trying to understand the larger world. I have yet to meet a tradition that wasn't enhanced by interacting with others."

He's such a world citizen.

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