Profiles in Character #41: Yo-Yo Ma Connects People Through Music

In 1993, thirty-seven-year-old renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma faced a very tough audience, one he had traveled thousands of miles to be with, the Bushmen of Africa’s Kalahari Desert. But they didn’t want to hear him play.  They wanted him to listen to their music, played on instruments he had never experienced.  The trip, he later said, “changed my life.  It was “more powerful than almost anything I’ve done.” 

Born in 1955 in Paris to Chinese parents, he took up the cello at age 4.  When the family emigrated to New York City in 1962, he gained acclaim after playing for President Kennedy and had his first recital at Carnegie Hall at 16. He could have entered a lucrative touring career as a soloist but chose college instead.  After stints at Columbia and Julliard, he entered Harvard.  With introspection and insatiable curiosity as core traits, public adulation was not his primary concern. “I knew I was young and immature,” he said.  ‘I also know that playing the instrument, even playing it well, was not what music was about.  And I knew there were many things about the world I wanted to know.”  One part of that world was the Bushmen, whose music he had encountered in a Harvard anthropology class.

Ma’s encyclopedic repertoire includes 90 albums and has garnered 19 Grammy Awards. The classical cello repertoire was a start but his passion for wider experiences led to a “crossover” career, playing with country, fiddle, jazz, and tango musicians.  In a video series, Inspired by Bach, he plays Bach’s Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello, partnering with, among others, an architect, a choreographer and Olympic ice dancers, all to help the general public understand Bach’s genius. The first in the series, in collaboration with a landscape architect, created the Toronto Music Garden on the Lake Ontario waterfront, a venue for concerts and community events.  His desire to bring music to all ages led to appearances on Sesame Street. After a class in Salt Lake City, a high school student asked if his cello had a name.  Ma said “no” and invited the student to name it.  “Petunia,” she said, and the name stuck.

Yo-Yo Ma personifies the meaning of his name: “Yo” in Chinese means “friendly.”  He appeared on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood and Fred Rogers said of him that he was “the most other-oriented genius I’ve ever known.”  On a film shoot for a Nike commercial in Beaverton, Oregon in 1994, Ma played an impromptu concert for employees, leading Kassia Sing, the coordinator of the shoot, to observe: “There was a pureness of spirit with him, which was unexpected from someone of his stature.”  Journalist Edith Eisler, having interviewed him, noted that people ask: ‘Is he really as nice as he seems?’  “No, much nicer” she replies.  Richard Kogan, who’s played in a trio with Ma, said “Yo-Yo is really more generous, less self-absorbed than other people.  People who don’t know him well think it’s an act, but we know he’s really like that.”

Ma’s humility appears untouched by genius or acclaim.  He’s been seen in a concert turning the pages for orchestral stand mates, hugging musicians around him in thanks while audiences applaud him and going outside to play for those standing in line who could not get a ticket to his sold-out concert.

Born in France, schooled in America, and a performer across the globe, Yo-Yo has been dedicated to bringing people together.  In 1998, still entranced by his Kalahari experience, he created the Silk Road Project which brings musicians from around the world to share their music and culture with each other and their audiences. In explaining the project, whose name comes from the fabled Silk Road of antiquity, Ma notes that “Every time I open a newspaper, I am reminded that we live in a world where we can no longer afford not to know our neighbors.”  The organization’s motto, unsurprisingly, is “What Happens When Strangers Meet.”  Ma was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace in 2006 in recognition of this work.

His life has not always been easy. In his early twenties, the curvature of his spine due to scoliosis was so severe that surgery was the only option, an operation that if it damaged his nerves could have ended his career.  The rods inserted to straighten his spine worked and actually added two inches to his height.  With characteristic humor he quipped that he had thus “grown in stature.”

Yo-Yo Ma became a U.S. citizen in 2001 and his music has lifted American spirits in difficult times.  On September 11, 2002, he was the first musician to ever play at Ground Zero, as the names of those who lost their lives were read.  During the COVID-19 pandemic, he began posting video performances using the hashtag #Songs of Comfort and sparked other artists to join the effort.

If his Kalahari trip changed his life, his life has touched so many others, a testament to the power of the arts combined with a person’s character to improve the world.

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