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" One of the things I love about music is live performance. "
Yo-Yo Ma
Music
Live
Things
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" We may be coming to a new golden age of instrument making. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" I think that peace is, in many ways, a precondition of joy. "
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" I think all musicians have at one time or another experienced one physical problem or another. I have had tendinitis a couple of times, so I try to be really careful. It takes patience and persistence to overcome injury. "
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" I realized late in life that my twin passions are music and people. "
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" After reaching 50, I began to wonder what the root of life is. "
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" 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. "
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" People will ask, 'Are you famous?' And I always answer, 'My mother thinks so.' "
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" My involvement in the political arena is to make sure there's a place for culture. "
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" I learn something not because I have to, but because I really want to. That's the same view I have for performing. I'm performing because I really want to, not because I have to bring bread back home. "
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" Good things happen when you meet strangers. "
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" Music is powered by ideas. If you don't have clarity of ideas, you're just communicating sheer sound. "
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" 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. "
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" I think anybody who goes away finds you appreciate home more when you return. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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