In the year of the outbreak, Yo-Yo Ma collaborated with pianist Catherine Stott on a new album, Songs of Comfort and Hope. He said the tracks on this album are what we want to say to everyone.
When Yo-Yo Ma explained the original intention of the album, he talked about his musical hero Bernstein. After Kennedy's assassination, Bernstein told him that from now on, we want to make music more powerful, better, more focused and more moving than ever before, and as musicians, this is our answer to violence. Now Yo-Yo Ma's music is a musician's answer to today's world.
Text | Li Feiran
Anthropologist in music
Cellist Yo-Yo Ma often closes his eyes when playing music. The player next to the cello is like a sleeping child, every emotion is undisguised, laughing with the allegro with his head held high, pulling to the slow board and frowning and bowing his head, following the melody into sorrow. The sound of his piano appears in concert halls and resounds in the crowd, but no matter where it is, his music always has an intoxicating power. The people of the scene gradually quieted down and followed him into a dream composed of notes, only breathing in the crowd, the bow and the strings were intertwined, and the loudest sound belonged to Yo-Yo Ma's cello.
Because of his intoxicating cello, Yo-Yo Ma won a lot of praise, and he was often referred to as the great Yo-Yo Ma, who was praised for his music and character. However, outside of music, Yo-Yo Ma has a kind of child's naughtiness, and in the accompanying documentaries, he often makes grimaces and loves to tell jokes. Every time the host read his personal introduction on the stage, Ma Youyou, who was waiting for the stage, whispered a joke backstage.
...... He's recorded over 90 albums...—half of them were stolen from others!
...... 17 Grammy Award winners (note: 18 times now)...– forget about it!
The person who accompanied him listened to the introduction and asked, Are you a graduate of Julia?
No, no, no. Ma Youyou solemnly denied that he had made it up.
In fact, all the presentations on stage are true. Yo-Yo Ma, a well-known talented cellist, began learning cello at the age of four, soloed solo at the age of six, and participated in a concert broadcast on television in the United States at the age of seven, introduced by the American conductor Bernstein, and the audience included then President Kennedy and former President Eisenhower. Before the age of 16, he had already performed with the world's most renowned symphony orchestras, held concerts in historic concert halls, and recorded and released hit albums. He did attend the Juilliard School, the hall of music, and was at the top of the junior division, but Yo-Yo Ma backstage didn't lie, and he dropped out a year before graduation.
It took him a long time to confirm whether he wanted to be a musician. After leaving Julia, he entered Harvard University, majoring in anthropology, when he seriously considered stopping playing the piano after graduation and becoming an anthropologist. During his college years, he canceled a large number of performance arrangements, focused on studying people, dealing with various people, observing their lives, listening to other people's ideas, discussing with physicists, chatting with philosophers, discussing people with biology professors, and also began to read masterpieces of classical Chinese literature, read Tang poems and Song Ci, and ponder all kinds of people in "Dream of the Red Chamber".
After graduation, Yo-Yo Ma returned to his starting point, still a cellist, still working with the world's strongest orchestra, still recording classical repertoire, but he became a little different, he began to appear in more places beyond the boundaries of classical music, in the children's enlightenment program "Sesame Street", in the corner of civic park, in the middle of the Middle East conflict front without concert halls, in the noisy crowd, Yo-Yo Ma was playing the cello.
Yo-Yo Ma has twice appeared on the "Sesame Street" program source network
Yo-Yo Ma loves music, but as he himself says, what I really love is people. He cares about others, not as a polite courtesy, but as a genuine curiosity. He was one of the very few people who asked for an introduction to the reporter's personal experience before the interview, and at the beginning of the interview, he was still reading my resume with his head down, and his opening remark was, these experiences are so interesting, I would love to hear.
My life is not so interesting, it is not worth writing a long story, and I am worth writing a very short and short article. However, I have met a lot of very interesting people, and it should be said that my experience is much more interesting than mine. Yo-Yo Ma told "People" with a smile. Music is my air, it allows me to breathe. However, music for me, like looking at the stars at night, or looking at a map of the world, makes me feel that there is a bigger and wider world outside of myself. My greatest pleasure is to see the surprise of discovering new knowledge in a person's eyes, a fresh discovery, a fresh understanding, and every little thing around me is new. There's so much we can learn from each other.
The musician spent more than half of the interview talking about the great things he found in others — Chinese musician Wu Tong wrote new pieces during the pandemic, fishermen in the Pacific who could identify directions by the waves, how his young grandson learned to walk, and the Xi'an people he met designed great buildings the last time he performed in China. He rarely talked about himself in the remaining time, and in turn asked me, how did you spend the isolated days at home?
It is this kind of Yo-Yo Ma, in 2020, when the new crown outbreak occurs, the first thing to do when you come to the office is to consult with colleagues: there are so many medical staff on the front line of epidemic prevention, what can we do?
Isolated at home, he began to play the piano online for others. Sitting in his study, he played to more than 18 million strangers "Going Home," "Over the Rainbow," an adaptation of Dvośák's symphony, and the classic World War II song "We'll Meet Again."
After resuming live performances, he teamed up with old friend pianist Kathryn Stott to make a catalogue of the pieces into an album and held a concert in Taipei. The album is called "Songs of Consolation and Hope", which contains dvořák, Mendelssohn, Rachmaninoff, folk songs and tunes from around the world, as well as film soundtracks and pop songs, all of which are familiar melodies that evoke warm memories. It all started with Yo-Yo Ma's determination in the office, you see, I have a cello here and I can do something.
One weekend in March, Yo-Yo Ma went to a community school near his home to get vaccinated against COVID-19. There was a lot of space on the spot, with a dozen people sitting scattered at a long distance, including staff in charge of vaccination, as well as nearby residents who were vaccinated at the same time. After waiting for half an hour on the spot after the vaccination, he took out his cello and played the violin for them in a mask, and the empty hall echoed with Bach and "Ave Marie", and after the performance, the audience applauded enthusiastically. Local reporters hurried to arrive, but Yo-Yo Ma quickly left, saying it was just a give something back to others.
His son, Nicholas, said that when he was a child, he did not understand the meaning of cellist, and seeing that his father always dragged a large suitcase to the airport, he once thought that his father was a worker at the airport to repair airplanes. Today's father is still the same, dragging the cello case all day, flying around the world to perform, he is a person who wants to make a difference in the world, but he just has a cello in his hand.
Yo-Yo Ma played after vaccination Screenshot of the video source
Find your voice
Yo-Yo Ma is a Chinese-American musician, and in a way, both the East and the West see him as a mystery. He had a naïveté rare in both cultures.
He once founded the Silk Road Project, with a simple goal of blending different regional styles into new music. The musicians involved recalled that the feeling of posting this program was that I was really scared to death. This simple goal has aroused the doubts of Naysayer, who always tell a seemingly realistic truth, which is full of negative Nay (no) - Yo-Yo Ma tried to integrate national music, Nay, the old rules were broken by him; but also to start an orchestra, Nay, nothing more than to make a splash, mostly for impure purposes, to travel in the name of music.
Yo-Yo Ma is also troubled by Nay's voice, many people do not believe in pure existence, but he told the members that we should believe in pure power.
A man who believes in purity is rare, but it is established in him. He has an Asian face, speaks some Chinese, and likes to read classical Chinese literature, but the realistic implications of music for a Chinese family he has never experienced since he was a child. Today's most famous pianist in China practiced when he was a child, every time he played a wrong note, his father would beat his calf, and set a musical goal for his son that he must play the piano in all of China to get the first place, and then the whole world, when he was seven years old, he practiced for nearly 6 hours a day, after losing a piano competition, the intensity of the practice intensified, he continued to participate in music competitions, and vowed not to fail again, until he won the first place in the international competition. More than one person has told the father and son that music is not just a competition, but the father and son believe in the meaning of hard work, and many parents believe in this belief and use them as an example.
However, music is different for Yo-Yo Ma. His father, Ma Xiaojun, was a student of Ma Sicong, the first Chinese violinist, who completed a doctorate in music while studying in France, and in 1954, he applied to return to China and did not receive a reply, so he had to drag his family to work in a restaurant in Paris. When Ma Was born, the family lived on a shoestring, cold and old little room, and then had to move to the United States with his family. Music is a rare pleasure in their turbulent lives, and Bach is often played in their homes, which is a gift of beauty shared by parents and children.
At the beginning of his musical career, his father Ma Xiaojun also supervised his son's practice, but he asked his son to practice only two bars of Bach every day, and it was enough to taste a little music. Pablo Casals, the greatest cellist of the 20th century, heard seven-year-old Yo-Yo Ma playing the piano and liked the child so much that he told him not only to practice, but to always leave some time to go out and play baseball. Tell Ma Xiaojun not to give him any restrictions and let him grow up naturally.
Parents protect a child's innocence in a life that is not easy. Yo-Yo Ma has never participated in a music competition, and he has never been beaten for practicing the piano, he does not need to use music to earn a way out, and no one asks him to do so. In the first days of learning the piano, his father only let him play the piano for 15 minutes a day, practicing the piano to learn to concentrate, and the rest of the time they had to play games together, eat delicious food, and tell interesting stories. Sister plays the violin at home, Yo-Yo Ma plays the cello, the two people sometimes fight for the piece, this is my cello music, you can't play, the mother corrects them, the music is not yours, it is not mine, the music is everyone's. She often begged those around her not to call him genius, and repeatedly told her son that you, like everyone else, are not outliers or geniuses.
In Yo-Yo Ma's world, music is just music, and spending time with the cello is the greatest relaxation of the day. Six-year-old Yo-Yo Ma has been able to figure out different ways to find the same song by himself, and every discovery is a joy that can be shared with others, and he often chases after his mother to show her, do you like it? Growing up with the music was his curiosity – why is the cello so big and the violin so small? Why did Bach write this piece? When he wrote this melody, was he happy or sad? Why is this section so pulled? Is there anything else?
Music is always happy, free, carefree, not a tool for making a living, and has nothing to do with dignity, status, or the pressure to survive. This purity has won Yo-Yo Ma musical success, and has also brought fame and fortune that have not been deliberately pursued. Yo-Yo Ma, 16, is already world-famous, and all kinds of voices say to him, you are a genius. Because of his music, he flew all over the world, received flowers and cheers every concert night, and fame made his life easy, he could get tickets to any NBA, and he bet his classmates that he could easily win a kiss from a girl.
At that time, the American composer Leon Kirchner reminded him that you are a great musician, but you have not yet found your own voice. This reminder trapped Yo-Yo Ma, what is his voice? What does music mean?
This is not an easy question to answer. Bernstein had a musical enlightenment program that swept the United States, "Young People's Concerts." Facing the children sitting in the audience, he asked the whole symphony orchestra to cooperate with his narration, repeatedly demonstrating, and proving to the children that the meaning of music is Nothing, which may make you cry and laugh and think about it, but the music itself does not constitute meaning, and rich feelings are born in the music, but what is important is not music.
Unable to find his voice, 16-year-old Yo-Yo Ma became the biggest Naysayer of his life. He began to smoke, drink, skip class, not practice on time, and deliberately opened the lid on rainy days to let the cello rain. He used madness to describe his rebellious adolescence — to be a musician, Nay, get it, fly from concert hall to concert hall, pull old tracks over and over again, all the notes are looping, what does it really mean to be a profession?
At a critical moment in his life, he met Casals again. It was in the midst of a live concert, when he was a ninety-year-old man who could hardly do anything more, but as soon as he stepped on the stage, his music was still shocking and exciting, and the power was inspiring. He can no longer play the cello as he did in his youth, but the mission he gave to each note is unforgettable.
Casals famously said that I am a person first, a musician second, and a cellist third. He told Yo-Yo Ma that music takes place between notes, to find endless diversity in music. Yo-Yo Ma travels to an unfamiliar world to meet more people and find answers. He saw the old man playing the piano in the tavern, and the couple dating in the cemetery, and I felt closer to the "human" people.
The greatest revelation occurred during a trip to Africa, where everyone sang and danced around torches to bless the sick people of the tribe, who sang and danced unknowingly, and after a while asked the people around us, what are we doing? Later he said that it was this answer that hit him and that we were creating meaning.
Yo-Yo Ma found his voice, music only makes sense if you live in a crowd, which has become the motif of his music - when the music starts, what is the most important thing in the room?
In class, in interviews, in public or private speeches, he repeats the same answer over and over again: not the prestigious cello with a history of more than 270 years, not the repertoire left by the composers of the past, and not the person who plays the music, but the person who listens to it. Once this is lost, the meaning of music disappears. The success of music is not in how beautiful the timbre is played, how great the instrument is, but in the fact that it proves that we live in the same world. I'm willing to play for 70 people, 40 people can, and one person is fine, because as long as he gets something out of the music, my efforts are worth it. At the end of the day, music is one-on-one communication, and as long as someone needs it, I will find a way to give it to them, and music is something I can give in return to others.
After graduating from anthropology, Yo-Yo Ma became a musician again, and to this day. Before graduation, he gave a concert at Harvard because too many people wanted to listen, and some people didn't grab tickets. Before the performance officially began, Yo-Yo Ma came out in the gown that was about to take the stage, carried the violin, sat down in the corridor, and played a song for those who could not get in. This kind of behavior breaks the rules of the performance industry, the corridors are noisy, there is no sound, this kind of playing also destroys the mystery, solemnity and beauty of classical music, but the cello in the hustle and bustle sounds particularly bright, that is, the voice of Yo-Yo Ma.
Many years later, the voice is still bright, and in the war-torn improvised concert hall, on the site of the 9/11 incident, his cello sound is a kind of concern for people. Before his father died, Yo-Yo Ma played the fifth Saraband of Bach's A cappella suite at his bedside, which was also the song that his father gave him when he was a child to put him to sleep, and the music between father and son was always clear and pure, and they said goodbye in Bach.
Yo-Yo Ma and his sister playing the Image Source Network
Live as the sun
Yo-Yo Ma, as a musician, has a rare slack. Music in his life does not carry any heavy practical significance, and interview questions and answers often lead to the ordinary state of an ordinary person. What is your favorite music? His answer was that I liked Bach, and pulling Bach for a while when I was tired would make me relax, but if I was too tired and I didn't want to play the piano, I would use the quilt to get up and sleep.
While introducing his new album, he explained the importance of music during the quarantine period, music is an antidote to the soul, while deciphering his own meaning, emphasizing that other methods are also effective, going out for a walk, meeting friends, taking a deep breath, eating a big meal is also a good way, but I often eat too much, which is a problem, after saying that I make a grimace. He often makes everyone laugh in the dialogue, music is not bigger than the world, no bigger than nature, it is a way of living, but it is only one of the ways of living. There are other ways to make you happy, you can also try.
He had two children, grew up hanging out with them, taking the siblings to eat good food, teaching them to drive, but never teaching them music. I don't know how to enjoy music. I love music, but music doesn't have a 'how to enjoy' question. There is no how to in the music, it is like living without a how to manual, which teaches us how to live and how to do it. You hear the sound, they make up the music, you listen to it and feel happy, you feel like it, and that's enough. Mr. Ma said he often felt that classical music had an overly complex classification, baroque, classicism, romanticism, impressionism, modernism, which had only one name, music.
The Harvard school magazine records that when Ma Youyou returned to the school to visit the teacher, the other person's wife was in the hospital at the time, and Ma Youyou promised to go to the ward to play a song for her as a blessing for recovery. When he really took the piano into the ward, the patient lying on the bed repeatedly said that he wanted to eat kimchi. The person who took care of her reminded that Yo-Yo Ma had come to visit you, do you want to listen to Yo-Yo Ma's cello, or eat kimchi? Hearing that the answer was still kimchi, the teacher turned his head helplessly, but found that the cellist was gone. Half an hour later, Ma Youyou ran back to the ward sweating, holding in his arms five or six cans of kimchi of different flavors.
Yo-Yo Ma will actively adapt to others, and almost all musicians who have worked with him have this impression. He and his music are like water, accommodating all kinds of differences. The late pianist Leon Fleischer recounted that he once worked with Yo-Yo Ma, and the conductor suddenly changed the playing prompt for the cello in the middle of a rehearsal, which was a big change without preparation, he saw that Yo-Yo Ma just smiled, did not say a word, quickly adapted to the new requirements of playing, and completed the whole piece without a trace.
This easy-going is occasionally present among top musicians, but not commonly. An important reason is that once music is easy-going, it is difficult to stick to it. Conductor Karajan achieved the most distinctive recording of the berlin philharmonic's history by relying on dictatorial violence, and Seiji Ozawa and Haruki Murakami lamented that Bernstein was an uncompromising musical genius, but he wanted to be a good man too much, always listening to opinions large and small, and absolute egalitarianism damaged the majesty of his orchestra, and the final music lost its unity.
As a young man, Yo-Yo Ma rehearsed with Seiji Ozawa on the Source Network
However, Yo-Yo Ma is always Yo-Yo Ma. He has worked with all the world's leading orchestras, played with musicians of different styles, worked with the toughest and most easy-going conductors in history, blended into very different backgrounds, but retained his own voice, which when the music began, tied together a very different group of people and reached resonance.
Perhaps this is the real genius of the cellist. Yo-Yo Ma has become a magnet for music, and classical music is no longer an elegant symbol that exists only in records and concert halls, it draws together groups that are not originally connected and lives in the crowd. More and more people like the symphony of bows and strings, TV series, cartoons, Hollywood blockbusters, children's programs, astronomical lectures, weddings, birthdays have sounded the sound of Yo-Yo Ma's piano. On more than one occasion, he took the piano to television, playing the bow and demonstrating the philosophy of music.
Yo-Yo Ma described his job as sharing life, the essence of holding a concert is to bring composers, performers, and listeners together in the same time and space, and the only purpose of playing music is to witness the birth of truth together.
He was always interested in other people's opinions, and after a concert, he always asked people what they were doing, what they were thinking, whether it was related to music or not. He was a very sincere and down-to-earth man. British conductor Benjamin Zander said in an interview with U.S. media. It's incredible that someone of his caliber is so humble... Because he is so humble, kind, and caring about others, it also prevents him from becoming a superstar character.
He encouraged almost everyone he met, and people who had been in contact with Yo-Yo Ma called him a source of joy, and the American journalist Krista Tippett asked in an interview with Yo-Yo Ma that even if he didn't radiate joy, he could still play a powerful masterpiece, and whether the music was good or bad had nothing to do with character, so why should he always live as the sun?
Yo-Yo Ma replied to her: Nadia Browné (note: 19th century French musicians) said that musicians are priests, music is to let people enter the church, you have to take everyone to sublimate the existence to a higher meaning, at least music should make everyone better. Of course, we're living into the 21st century, and I'm not sure if that idea holds, but I'm willing to try, try to make it work.
Son Nicholas describes his father and his profession this way, he has traveled all over the world to play music, music has not taken him further afield, in his world, music has been taking him home.
In fact, music gave him a gift in return. Yo-Yo Ma, 66, showed the same immersion he showed when he played live, exactly like the little boy who played the cello for the first time on stage, and he gave this dream to others. In his life, music is free, happy, carefree that has never changed.
In Yo-Yo Ma's documentary, he ended the mischievous backstage ridicule and took to the stage to give a speech, opening by saying, Let me tell a joke first—
Once upon a time there was a little boy who said to his father, when I grow up, I will be a musician. Dad listened and thought about it, but child, these two wishes cannot be realized at the same time.
He was the first to laugh when he finished speaking. The first time he played the cello, he was only four years old, and more than 60 years later, there were still Yo-Yo Ma and his cello in the crowd.