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" 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. "

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

Yo-Yo Ma

Been

Jazz

Including

" 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. "

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

" I've been traveling all over the world for 25 years, performing, talking to people, studying their cultures and musical instruments, and I always come away with more questions in my head than can be answered. "

" 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. "

" I'm not likely to forget where I've been and what I've done and learned. I think it's just as important to play new instruments as to play new pieces. The old ones are getting scarcer and the new ones more and more wonderful. "

" I remember when I was growing up. My great wish was to understand who I was and how I fit in the world. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

Easy

World

" Children, in a way, are constant learners. Certainly sponge-like. Absorbing everything without careful analysis, even though, at the same time, they are certainly capable of incredible insights. "

" Once something is memorable, it's living and you're using it. That to me is the foundation of a creative society. "

Yo-Yo Ma

Society

You

" 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

Fall

Faith

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" We may be coming to a new golden age of instrument making. "

" You know, you can have someone who's the very best at something, but if there's not that kind of chemistry, collaborating is not going to amount to anything. "

" As a musician I'm kind of nomadic, Waldo-like. I show up in different places, and I'm witness to unbelievable things. "

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

" Good things happen when you meet strangers. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

Performance

Job

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

" 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. "

" 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. "