Yo-Yo Ma: Practicing is not only playing your instrument

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

Things can fall apart, or threaten to, for many reasons, and then there's got to be a leap of faith. Ultimately, when you're at the edge, you have to go forward or backward; if you go forward, you have to jump together.
-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

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

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

Good things happen when you meet strangers.
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

There's a part of me that's always charging ahead. I'm the curious kid, always going to the edge.
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 really would like to be involved in things and to understand things, and in some ways you've got to be careful what you wish for because I feel very, very blessed to have such an interesting life and to be able to have little snapshots of lives of people from many different parts of the world.
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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My involvement in the political arena is to make sure there's a place for culture.
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

Sound is ephemeral, fleeting, but some sort of a physical manifestation can help you hold on to it longer in time. I'm sure of this; I've always thought the sound that you make is just the tip of the iceberg, like the person that you see physically is just the tip of the iceberg as well.
Yo-Yo Ma

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