Yo-Yo Ma is one of those rare people who can make even
a hardened cynic believe that artistic and personal integrity go together.
He is not only one of the greatest, most versatile cellists of his or
any other time, but is endowed with an extraordinarily inquiring, adventurous
mind that leads him into far-flung intellectual, cultural, and historical
explorations. Lesser men and musicians might be suspected of engaging
in these enterprises to generate publicity, but the sincerity of Ma’s
involvement with his projects is never in doubt: he throws himself into
them whole-heartedly and absorbs them into his musical and personal
life. Completely open to people and ideas, he radiates a genuine, embracing
warmth; totally natural and unassuming, he is always eager to learn.
In a notoriously competitive, slippery profession, not a disparaging
word is ever heard either from him or about him.
I have been his ardent fan and admirer for a long time
and have had several opportunities to talk with him. When I first met
him at the 1991 Tanglewood Music Festival (see "Yo-Yo Ma: Music from
the Soul," May/June 1992), he was experimenting with a piece by Tod
Machover for electronic and acoustic cello and four computers. By the
time he telephoned me for our latest conversation in February, he had,
in addition to his regular performing and recording activities, undertaken
numerous fascinating journeys through time and space, from the world
of Bach and the Baroque to Appalachian folk fiddling and the Argentinean
tango. As he talked about these projects, a connecting thread between
them emerged despite their diversity, which he described as "a linear
continuum in the pursuit of learning something." Indeed, the word "learn"
runs through his conversation like a Leitmotif.
Ma’s recent collaboration with Chinese composer Tan Dun,
whose music calls for Chinese and European instruments on the soundtrack
for the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (which has just won
several Oscar nominations), is clearly linked to his current adventure:
the Silk Road Project. Described as "a new initiative aimed at exploring
cross-cultural influences among and between the lands comprising the
legendary Silk Road and the West," its activities include concerts,
festivals, and educational outreach in North America, Europe, and Asia.
Shortly before our interview, I heard Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble,
an international group of young musicians who play both Western and
Eastern instruments, present a sampling of their programs at Columbia
University’s Miller Theater. The event featured musical excerpts and
commentary by Ma and several scholars, including the Silk Road Project’s
executive director, ethnomusicologist Theodore Levin, professor of music
at Dartmouth College. Naturally, the Project became the interview’s
first subject.
What sparked the idea for the Silk Road Project?
YO-YO MA 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. One of these is the
idea of culture as a transnational influence, and the Silk Road, though
basically a trade route, also connected the cultures of the peoples
who used it. The Project started with several symposia of scholars,
and it was eventually decided to form a nonprofit, knowledge-based organization
that would combine new and traditional information about places where
people have been making exciting, wonderful music. 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. 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.
How do you find them?
YO-YO MA We did a lot
of field work; Ted Levin and others went to Central Asia, China, and
Mongolia, located composers, and listened to their works, and just yesterday
we heard more compositions from Armenia, Turkey, India, Pakistan, Japan,
and Korea. Then about two years ago, we asked 16 people to write pieces,
and last summer, we invited about 60 musicians to Tanglewood for a 12-day
workshop to play them so we could make some sensible programs. They
came from Iran, Uzbekestan, Tajikistan, China, and Mongolia, but many
master performers can also be found in Toronto, Chicago, and San Francisco,
and there is a large contingent in Queens, New York. However, they keep
up a strong tradition of their native music, even though, like many
emigrants, they often have to do other things to make a living.
Did your 60 musicians speak English?
YO-YO MA Some did; language
is a problem we have to address. 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.
Are you including Western music in your programs, too?
YO-YO MA Of course, that’s
the whole idea. 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. Take Mahler’s "Das Lied
von der Erde." When Mahler developed heart trouble, a friend gave him
a book of Chinese poetry called The Chinese Flute, and it interested
him enough to use it for "Das Lied." Now we want to perform it in Chinese
and are having the texts translated back. Mahler didn’t go to Java or
Bali or Malaysia, but Bartók did go to Turkey and talked to Turkish
composers; Stravinsky claimed he never went to a traditional Russian
wedding, but it later turned out that he did. You can hear all these
influences in their music, and seeking out their sources has certainly
opened up my ears. In March, I am playing a concerto with the New York
Philharmonic that was inspired by the Project and written for me by
Richard Danielpour . . .
Whose music you’ve performed before.
YO-YO MA That’s right.
He is Iranian-American, and when he was a child, his grandmother sang
Persian songs to him; he remembers a lot of them, and when he was writing
this piece, he asked her to sing them again. The concerto includes a
part for the kamancheh, the Persian spiked fiddle, which will be played
by Kayhan Kalhor, a fabulous Iranian musician and composer, who studied
in Canada and divides his time between New York and Teheran. He was
among the people that came to Tanglewood, and the Project commissioned
him to write a piece that we’ll play before the Danielpour; it’s scored
for various Eastern instruments and a string sextet and it’s wonderful.
Then the orchestra will play Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, a
19th-century Russian view of Persia.
Tell me more about some of the Eastern instruments.
YO-YO MA The odd-shaped
one I played the other day is the Mongolian morin khuur, which means
"horse-head fiddle" because of the shape of its scroll. I was given
and taught to play it by some Mongolian musicians at Tanglewood. It
has two strings, tuned to F and B-flat, and each can be used as an open
drone while the other is fingered. But like the Indian fiddle, the sarangi,
it has no fingerboard; you play by pulling the strings sideways or rubbing
your nail against them. The bow has no screw—you tighten the hair by
feel, pulling on it with your fingers. It is held underhand, as with
the gamba and the Chinese er-hu, which also has two strings. These instruments
were probably the precursors of the viol family, certainly of the gamba;
the cello was a later upstart.
But in one piece you played the cello. How do you make
it blend with the Chinese instruments?
YO-YO MA By getting into
a different sound world. In the history of classical music, the rate
of change in Europe since 1500 has been astronomical, but before that
it was much slower. When you strip away some of the innovations of the
last 500 years and get into a pre-1600 playing mode, you can relate
to other styles and instruments. I think I learned about that from playing
Baroque cello, and folk music with Mark O’Connor and Edgar Meyer.
I’ve long been anxious to find out more about those
projects. How did you transform your Strad into a Baroque instrument,
apart from taking out the endpin and putting on gut strings?
YO-YO MA I used a different
bridge and tailpiece. I could have changed the bass bar and got a shorter
neck, but I didn’t want to do that: it was too radical. The basic idea
was to remove pounds and pounds of pressure from the cello by using
different materials to produce sound. I also played with a Baroque bow,
which took a good deal of adjustment—physical, mental, and aural.
Have you returned the Strad to its normal state?
YO-YO MA No, it’s still
a Baroque instrument. Working with Ton Koopman’s Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra
and its fabulous players was a great opportunity for me, and the repertoire
is so rich and beautiful, I want to continue to play it.
But for the Bach Suites you didn’t use a Baroque instrument.
YO-YO MA No, I just hold
the bow slightly differently and sometimes tune low.
I’ve heard you play them many times and always loved
it; I’ve also seen the film series, Inspired by Bach. Would you
tell me how that came about?
YO-YO MA Essentially,
the idea was to ask, What is a piece of music? I think its materiality
is much more than just the notes. It’s a code that opens a door to a
world everybody interprets differently, because our aesthetic and sensory
values are different and each generation has to discover its own. So
we said, Suppose we regard a piece of music as almost genetic material,
like DNA, to the mind of a person who is both very receptive and imaginative.
How would that person think of it, not in terms of the cello, but of
their own medium? So for Julie Messervy, who is a garden designer and
a family friend, the First Suite became a garden, a living thing, which,
like a piece of music, only exists if it’s nurtured. And it now exists
in Toronto, as a concert hall without walls, a place where people partake
in its living form, and it’s absolutely gorgeous. (See "The Toronto
Music Garden," Encore, April 2000.)
The Second Suite film was inspired by the fact that Bach
actually tried to do the impossible: to create polyphonic music on a
single-line instrument. The idea came from François Girard, who
had directed The Red Violin and films about Glenn Gould. He is
a very creative person and he wanted to do something on architecture.
He chose Piranesi, because he, too, tried the impossible: to design
structures that could in fact not be built. But François made
them exist in virtual form in the film. And in the Sixth Suite, ice
dancers Torvill and Dean, who are great favorites in my household, also
did on film what is impossible in reality: to skate [at that level]
for 27 minutes.
For the Third Suite, Mark Morris created a dance with
incredibly masterful, inventive choreography. When we perform it, I
feel that the dancers are living notes; as I watch them, I am literally
reading the text, and we sense a very profound interactivity. Mark took
the code of, say, irregular patterns, and then superimposed his own
irregular code on Bach’s patterns; this breathed a different life into
the piece without taking anything away from it. The work continues to
live in the company’s repertoire, and that makes me very happy.
The Fourth Suite film explores the question, How does
a piece of music exist in a society? How does it live within a person
who is ill, or an amateur musician, or someone who becomes absolutely
obsessed with it? The Fifth Suite film asks, What does this music have
in common with the world of Kabuki? Tamasaburo, a dancer I’ve admired
for a long time, took almost a year to get inside the piece; finally,
it was the idea of a candle, of lighting something, and also of the
flames being gradually extinguished, that was the unifying factor for
him, visually and choreographically. The result was a feeling of resignation,
of giving up, but of still nurturing that fire, that life in the piece.
One of the most interesting aspects of the film project
was collaborating with so many people—directors, filmmakers, and writers—over
a five-year period. I learned that there are two components to this.
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. 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. For me, those two lessons and
working together with all those idealistic, dedicated people constituted
a second college degree. 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. No matter what people
said about the project—and it raised a lot of eyebrows—I’ll never regret
having done it.
I actually got the courage for the Bach project from two
earlier experiences. One was a symposium, "What is the Meaning of Schweitzer’s
Life in the 1990s?," arranged by Mark Wolf, a federal judge in Boston
and the head of the Albert Schweitzer Foundation. He invited musicians,
doctors, social workers, theologians (members of the professions in
which Schweitzer was active) to meet for a weekend and talk about him.
He asked me to talk about Bach, so I had to reread many of Schweitzer’s
books. That weekend made me realize that, just like Bach, these people
were all trying to do something impossible, because the work of a doctor,
a social worker, a theologian, is never finished. The other was a lecture
on Bach by a fabulous historian and Bach scholar from Yale, Jaroslav
Pelikan, in which he asked me to participate.
This happened in the early ’90s, so it can take a long
time for an idea to be realized. It’s like the Silk Road—if you trace
the origin, it goes way back. Everything has a beginning somewhere and
one thing leads to another, though they may not seem connected: from
Bach to Baroque to Appalachian folk fiddling . . . Actually, those have
some common elements. Think of the drone and the way Bach uses pedal
notes. They’re all over classical music, and all over Celtic music,
too. In the second Gavotte of the Sixth Suite, you hear bagpipes, because
at that time, people in the cities were looking for an idealized rural
environment, and Bach wanted to evoke a country atmosphere.
How did you come to hook up with Mark O’Connor and
Edgar Meyer?
YO-YO MA I heard Mark
play at Stephane Grapelli’s 80th birthday concert at Carnegie Hall.
I went backstage and said, "You are phenomenal—can you teach me?" And
I found Edgar’s music making just as amazing. Eventually we got together
and the first thing we decided was that we needed a lot of time. So
we’d meet somewhere about every month and, to me, every meeting was
very exciting. The music sounded wonderful and I thought, "This is great,
I’m doing pretty well!" But not well enough for Mark and Edgar. Mark
hadn’t taught me very much but I could see he wasn’t happy with what
was coming out of my cello. Edgar is more verbal, and he could explain
what specifically I was doing wrong. It took me a long time to satisfy
them.
What did you have to do?
YO-YO MA I had to learn
a whole different style of playing, in terms of intonation, and even
more in terms of rhythm. The idea of rubato is deeply ingrained in much
classical music; we think that time, with harmony as a pillar, can be
bent slightly when playing a melody, a motive, or an interval. I realized
that Mark and Edgar have a different set of priorities. What’s of highest
value to them is absolute precision, a groove-like rhythm that’s very
hard for a classical musician to acquire; it demanded a real cultural
switch. Then, for Edgar, over-vibrating is a terrible thing, so I found
myself remembering the time I was listening to Casals and wondering
how he achieved such incredible expressivity with so little vibrato.
I’m trained to play in 2,700-seat halls, to project, and vibrato of
course helps the sound projection. This was closer to Baroque, and I
also changed my bow grip toward a much more Baroque feel.
Was most of the music written down or improvised?
YO-YO MA Mark is a natural
improviser, so most of the improvisation came from him. As for me, I’m
comfortable trying it in a private environment, but hardly feel equipped
to do it in public. One of the most important things they taught me
was how this oral tradition of music was passed along from generation
to generation, from Scandinavia to Ireland, Scotland to Canada, through
Appalachia to Texas, with slight variations, yet very precisely, in
an unbroken line by people who didn’t go to conservatories.
Are you still playing together?
YO-YO MA I hope we shall
never stop.
Playing Piazzolla’s tangos must have required another
cultural switch.
YO-YO MA The tango is
really a combination of many cultures, though it eventually became the
national music of Argentina. And the bandonéon, which we think
of as an Argentinean instrument, was actually invented in Germany by
a man named Band. It was the poor man’s church organ, became very popular
in France, was taken to Italy, and from there to Argentina in the 1800s
during the great emigration. The music came from African sources and
incorporated Spanish and Italian influences; it started from the bottom
of society. Piazzolla absorbed all these strains, then went to New York
as a teenager, listened to jazz, and studied in France with Nadia Boulanger.
I feel he is a great musician who influenced dance, jazz, and modernism,
and developed a new style of tango music. Playing it was another wonderful
learning experience. My good friend [pianist] Emanuel Ax says one of
the reasons he loves music is that you learn something new every day,
and that is what keeps us alive.
I was so happy to hear you play with him again last
fall, after what seemed like a long time.
YO-YO MA Yes, we are
both very busy, but we’ll always play together. It makes us so happy;
there is so much joy in music making when you know each other so well.
We try to save time for it every year, but during the last few years,
we’ve used it to play piano quartets with Isaac Stern and Jaimie Laredo.
However, this year was our 25th anniversary, and we couldn’t let that
go by without doing something by ourselves.
Do you still have time to do master classes?
YO-YO MA Sure, everywhere;
that’s part of reporting, of sharing with a community of people what
I learn from other places.
Learning to play all this new music and all these new
instruments also seems to me to be doing the impossible. Where do you
find the time and energy?
YO-YO MA Well, I’m 45
years old and I’ve been playing since I was 15, professionally since
I was about 20. I’ve spent at least 12 and a half years of my life traveling,
and one thing that’s very depressing and that I’m determined to avoid
is not being able to remember what I did in the course of a year. This
means you must have a reason to be in the places to which you go, and
you must do only things that you really care about.
So what’s in the future? What’s your next project?
YO-YO MA Well, I’m going
to Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan. I’m going to do something with [guitarist]
John Williams. He’s written a cello concerto, and solo pieces that I
really love, so I think I’m going to learn and record them. I’m going
to premiere the Danielpour Concerto in Lyon, where the French silk industry
is located, so there’s more than one reason to go there. I’m going to
Central Asia and to Turkey, where I’ll play some new pieces by Turkish
composers. Turkey, of course, is culturally so rich that I can’t wait
to check it out.
I remember your telling me in Tanglewood years ago
that you were planning to cut down.
YO-YO MA I have cut
down, not in terms of activity, but in terms of the number of concerts,
so I can do all these other things. I’ve been home a lot this winter
and that’s good. And I’m not likely to forget where I’ve been and what
I’ve done and learned.
WHAT
HE PLAYS
Yo-Yo Ma plays a 1733 Montagnana cello from Venice and
the 1712 Davidoff Stradivari, which he now uses only for Baroque music.
However, he also has two modern instruments: one that Moes & Moes
made for him a couple of years ago, and one he has only had a few months,
made by Mario Miralles, an Argentinean who lives outside Los Angeles.
"I love the Moes & Moes," says Ma. "I think it’s extraordinary.
I played on it for about four months last year and would have continued,
except that I had to go to Japan, where I had to play the Montagnana."
Since he seems to switch between them easily, I ask whether they are
the same in size and dimensions. "No," he says, "the Montagnana is bigger
than the Strad, and the Moes & Moes is in between. It’s their own
model; they collaborated on the instrument, and it’s like the child
of both of them.
"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. We may be coming to a new golden age of
instrument making. I also like Miralles’ work a lot, though I haven’t
played his cello in public yet. It takes me a while to get the feel
of an instrument." Perhaps the most remarkable thing about these cellos
is that when I heard Ma play the Moes & Moes last summer, I had
no idea it was a new cello and thought it was one of his Italian instruments.
It goes to show that a great player sounds like himself on any instrument.
Ma’s bow is a Tourte, and his strings, on all cellos,
are Jargar and Spirocore.
Excerpted
from Strings
magazine, May/June 2001, No. 94
