Yo Yo Ma

Trivia

• For his latest album, Songs of Joy & Peace, the multiple Grammy -winning cellist .
• Yo-Yo Ma invited many of his favorite artists from the worlds of popular and classical music to collaborate on a selection of songs -- some sacred, some secular, some traditionally seasonal, some simply beloved -- connected in their sense of wonder and appreciation of the holiday season.
• Yo-Yo Ma conceived of Songs of Joy & Peace as a universal holiday house party of music "uniting different forms of joy" with the idea of combining familiar material with songs that would offer the listener the gift of discovery performed by old friends and new.
• Songs of Joy & Peace celebrates the universal hopes, dreams and good cheer animating seasonal festivals -- Christmas, Hanukkah, Eid, Kwanzaa, Yuletide, Winter Solstice, New Year's, Ramadan -- the world over.
• Celebrating his 30th anniversary with Sony Classical and Sony Masterworks, Yo-Yo Ma is an exclusive Sony Classical artist, and his discography of over 75 albums (including 15 Grammy® Award winners) reflects his wide-ranging interests.
• He has made several successful recordings that defy categorization, among them Hush with Bobby McFerrin, Appalachia Waltz and Appalachian Journey with Mark O'Connor and Edgar Meyer and two Grammy®-winning tributes to the music of Brazil, Obrigado Brazil and Obrigado Brazil - Live in Concert.
• Yo-Yo Ma's most recent recordings include Paris: La Belle Époque, with pianist Kathryn Stott, Appassionato, which contains some of the world’s most romantic music and New Impossibilities, a live album recorded with the Silk Road Ensemble and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; he also appears on John Williams's soundtrack for Rob Marshall's film Memoirs of a Geisha.
• Across this full range of releases, Yo-Yo Ma remains one of the best-selling recording artists in the classical field.
• All of his recent albums have quickly entered the Billboard chart of classical best sellers, remaining in the Top 15 for extended periods, often with as many as four titles simultaneously on the list.
• Yo-Yo Ma is strongly committed to educational programs that not only bring young audiences into contact with music but also allow them to participate in its creation.

Quotes

• "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."
• "We may be coming to a new golden age of instrument making."
• "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."
• "The tango is really a combination of many cultures, though it eventually became the national music of Argentina."
• "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."
• "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. "
• "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."
• "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."
• "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."