Yo-Yo Ma

• Born: October 7, 1955
• Place of Birth: Paris, France

MUSICIAN

Yo-Yo Ma is widely considered one of the best cellists in the world. In addition to his flawless technique, audiences are said to appreciate the full tone and the range of emotional expression he brings to a variety of music including traditional orchestral works, new pieces by modern composers of varying musical genres, and collaborations with musicians from around the world.

Full name: Yo-Yo Ma

Areas of achievement: Music, education, film

Early Life

Yo-Yo Ma was born in France in 1955. His father, Hiao-Tsiun Ma, was a conductor, violinist, and musicologist. Formerly a faculty member at China’s Nanjing University, Hiao-Tsiun Ma lived in Paris after 1936. Yo-Yo Ma’s mother, Marina, was a singer who had moved to France from Hong Kong in 1949. Ma and his elder sister, Yeou-Cheng, were born in France and started learning music from their father when they were very young. Yeou-Cheng played violin, and Yo-Yo started on cello at age four. He began learning Johann Sebastian Bach’s Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello and started playing in public. The talented family moved to New York in 1961 when Hiao-Tsiun took a job there, and they enjoyed the friendship of several world-famous musicians. Violinist Isaac Stern introduced Ma to cellist Leonard Rose, who taught Ma through the Juilliard School’s preparatory division until 1971. Conductor Leonard Bernstein presented Ma in a televised concert at the Kennedy Center. At Juilliard, Ma met another young musician, pianist Emanuel Ax, who became a lifelong friend and musical collaborator.

In 1972, Ma entered Harvard University, where he earned a liberal arts degree with a concentration in anthropology in 1976. He also studied with composer Leon Kirchner at Harvard. During the summer months of his college years, he studied and performed chamber music at the Marlboro Festival in Vermont. This festival was directed by pianist Rudolf Serkin and provided an opportunity for Ma and his friend Ax to develop their duo. At the festival, Ma also met Jill Hornor, whom he married after graduation from Harvard.

Life’s Work

Ma began a year-long performance schedule after graduation, and in 1978, he won the Avery Fisher Prize for musical excellence. After his two children were born in 1983 and 1986, he reduced his touring schedule and put a great deal of energy into recording, winning several Grammy Awards. He recorded Ludwig van Beethoven and Johannes Brahms sonatas for cello and piano with Ax, whose own career was blossoming. Ma’s recordings covered a wide range of Western classical repertoire, ranging from the Bach suites to modern pieces pioneered by Mstislav Rostropovich and Jacqueline du Pré, who, after retiring due to a multiple sclerosis diagnosis, arranged for Ma to assume the guardianship of her famous Davidoff Stradivarius cello in 1983.

With his reputation secured as an interpreter of the finest Western classical music, Ma began to reach out into other musical languages. One of his first steps in this direction was his 1989 recording with French jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli. The cultural diversity within American music was an obvious attraction for Ma, who had premiered works by American composers, and he continued his work in jazz through performances and a recording with virtuoso improvisational singer Bobby McFerrin. Their album Hush (1992) multiplied their musical voices through multitracking. The recording remained on Billboard magazine’s “classical crossover” chart for two years.

Reaching out into yet another dimension of American music, Ma recorded the album Appalachia Waltz with renowned Appalachian country fiddler Mark O’Connor and classical bluegrass bassist Edgar Meyer in 1996. In 2011, Ma again teamed with Meyer, adding fiddler Stuart Duncan and thirty-year-old mandolinist Chris Thile to the group, to record a bluegrass album entitled The Goat Rodeo Sessions. The album reached number one on the Billboard classical crossover chart as well as on its bluegrass chart. The album peaked at number eighteen on the Billboard 200 chart.

Following the initial success of Appalachia Waltz, Ma branched out in another direction and explored the sounds of South America in 1997, recording Soul of the Tango, which featured the tangos of the late Argentinean composer Astor Piazzolla.

In 1998, Ma revisited Bach’s Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello. These pieces, as technically demanding as they are, were part of his childhood memories, and he had already recorded them in 1983, earning his first Grammy Award for Best Classical Instrumental Solo Album. However, he wanted to use this music to affirm what he viewed as deep connections to human creativity manifested in all of the arts. This project was accomplished over several years, resulting in the 1998 release of six films interpreting each of the Bach suites through the lenses of six other art forms. Ma’s artistic collaborators included garden designer Julie Moir Messervy, director François Girard, the engravings of the eighteenth-century architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi, choreographer Mark Morris, director Atom Egoyan, the Japanese Kabuki actor Tamasaburo Bando, and ice-skating champions Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean.

As a student at Harvard, Ma had become fascinated with the study of global cultures. As he traveled around the world, he took notice of the many nuances of musical expression made possible by the unique instruments and performance practices of the peoples he encountered. As a Chinese American, he represented the Chinese diaspora in a historic concert commissioned for the reunification of mainland China with Hong Kong in 1997. Composer Tan Dun, who had emerged from the Cultural Revolution as one of China’s leading composers, was known for utilizing traditional Chinese instruments and musical concepts in his modern pieces. In his symphonic work Heaven, Earth, Mankind, Tan utilized Ma’s cello to represent the “wood” timbre within the ancient Chinese system of eight instrumental categories. While other sections of the work are more tonal and make more use of traditional Chinese melodic patterns and instruments, this challenging movement for the cello is written in a dissonant chromatic idiom, suggesting China’s full participation in modern culture. Ma and Tan collaborated again in 2000, when Ma played on Tan’s award-winning film score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and in 2003, when Ma premiered Tan’s “The Map: Concerto for Cello, Video, and Orchestra” with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Even before collaborating with Tan, Ma had taken steps to facilitate and deepen his involvement with global musical traditions. In 1998, he began the Silk Road Project, appointing ethnomusicologist Ted Levin as executive director. Inspired by the cultural importance of the ancient trade routes of Central Asia, associated by Ma with the modern impact of the Internet, they collected compositions by composers from this region. In 2000, they invited musicians to a workshop at the Tanglewood Music Center in Lenox, Massachusetts. Western musicians were joined by colleagues from Mongolia, Iran, China, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and other countries. They learned the techniques and styles of each other’s traditions and studied new music. Ma learned to play the Mongolian morin khuur (“horse-head fiddle”). They formed the Silk Road Ensemble and gave concerts and workshops all over the world. Their first recording, Silk Road Journeys: When Strangers Meet, was made in 2001. Their 2007 concert tour in China and Hong Kong was highly successful.

Ma was appointed as a United Nations Messenger of Peace on September 21, 2006, the International Day of Peace, by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and in 2007, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon extended Ma’s appointment. By the time Ma turned sixty in 2015, he had recorded ninety albums and earned eighteen Grammy Awards. He is also the recipient of a National Medal of the Arts, the Kennedy Center Honors, the Polar Music Prize, and the Vilcek Prize in Contemporary Music. President Barack Obama presented him with a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2010.

The 2016 album Sing Me Home, recorded by Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble, secured the Grammy for Best World Music Album in 2017. After continuing live performances and teaming once again with Meyer, Thile, and Duncan for 2020's Not Our First Goat Rodeo, as well as with Kathryn Scott for Songs of Comfort and Hope (2020), Ma recorded a rendition of "Amazing Grace" for the 2021 inauguration of President Joe Biden. In early 2024, he performed at a ceremony honoring seven members of Jose Andres' World Kitchens who had been killed in Gaza April 1 during the Israel-Palestine war.

Throughout his career, Ma has been active in education. He has taught master classes for young professionals and has organized activities for young children and families. Since the 1980s, he has appeared on children’s television programs such as Sesame Street, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and Arthur. In 2002, the US Department of State appointed Ma a Culture Connect Ambassador to officially teach and train thousands of students all over the world.

Significance

Ma continues and extends the grand tradition of great cellists from previous generations. In his capable hands, older repertoire takes on new life and meaning. Sometimes he has recontextualized traditional repertoire by putting it in new settings and has transcribed music originally written for other instruments. He has also performed many original cello pieces.

While there are other classical virtuosos and popular-music stars who could accurately be described as “world famous,” Ma has gone beyond this category and has used his considerable musical talents and personal charm to achieve a deep level of intercultural diplomacy. Just as sophisticated world citizens are often multilingual, Ma has achieved true “multimusicality” by being able to adapt his playing to the conceptual requirements of various musical cultures. He has cited his experiences as an immigrant and cultural outsider as motivations for this desire to explore the musical intersections of various cultures.

Some critics have been skeptical about whether Ma could maintain the excellence of his core repertoire while simultaneously pursuing his global outreach and his interest in multimedia and education, but he has never restricted his activities. For his part, Ma has asserted that he feels no need to prove himself to others and that his focus in musical performance is as a means of expressing and sharing joy and finding solace. Nevertheless, when Ma performed all six Bach suites in a row at the 2015 London Proms, a rare feat, in honor of his sixtieth birthday, he demonstrated his enduring physical stamina and concentration.

Bibliography

Attanas, John. Yo-Yo Ma: A Life in Music. Evanston: Burke, 2003. Print.

Everett, Yayoi Uno, and Frederick Lau, eds. Locating East Asia in Western Art Music. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2004. Print.

Jeffries, Stuart. "Yo-Yo Ma: Bach, Big Bird, and Me." Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 28 July 2015. Web. 23 Mar. 2016.

Ma, Marina, and John A. Rallo. My Son, Yo-Yo. Hong Kong: Chinese UP, 1996. Print.

Ma, Yo-Yo. "Yo-Yo Ma on 'Touching Infinity' Through His Nearly 300-Year-Old Cello, Petunia." Interview by Terry Gross. National Public Radio, 29 May 2024, www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-4971129. Accessed 21 Aug. 2024.

Ma, Yo-Yo. "What Yo-Yo Ma Is Learning about Life and Music at 60." Interview by Jeffrey Brown. PBS NewsHour. NewsHour Productions, 19 Oct. 2015. Web. 23 Mar. 2016.

Ma, Yo-Yo, and Theodore Levin. “A Conversation with Yo-Yo Ma.” Along the Silk Road. Ed. Elizabeth Ten Grotenhuis. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 2002. 15–38. Print.

Shattuck, Kathryn. "Yo-Yo Ma Tries to Bring Us Comfort and Hope." The New York Times, 9 June 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/06/09/arts/music/yo-yo-ma-favorite-things.html. Accessed 22 July 2021.

Whiting, Jim. Yo-Yo Ma: A Biography. Westport: Greenwood, 2008. Print.

“Yo-Yo Ma’s Bluegrass-Inspired ‘Goat Rodeo.’” NPR Music. NPR, 21 Nov. 2011. Web. 28 Feb. 2012.