A Conversation with Yo-Yo Ma – HuffPost 10.24.13

Mike Ragogna: Hey Yo-Yo, how are you?

Yo-Yo Ma: I’m okay, how are you?

MR: I’m fine, and thank you again for allowing me to interrogate you about your latest.

YYM: Thank you. Is the light shining in my eyes? Is the interrogations going to be painful? Is there any waterboarding involved?

MR: [laughs] No, not this time. And that bright light shining in your eyes? That’s just your own consciousness flowing.

YYM: Oh my goodness, that’s the worst kind of interrogation. That’s really tough.

MR: [laughs] Let’s talk about The Silk Road Ensemble with Mr. Yo-Yo Ma. The gang has a new album A Playlist Without Borders, and I think the concept is awesome. And you have been entangled–we’ll get to your Tanglewood DVD in a moment–with this group for a long time now.

YYM: Well, I’m guilty.

MR: Another successful interrogation.

YYM: I just want to spare myself the pain, so I’m declaring myself totally guilty as charged and I hope that which will be forthcoming will not be so devastating that it will prevent me from pursuing my nefarious activities for the next number of years.

MR: Nah, your nefarious activities ain’t so nefarious, Yo.

YYM: [laughs] I’m guilty as charged because I think I probably became obsessed with thinking about it to the point that friends finally got together and said, “Okay…we’re going to gather a whole bunch of people together to talk about it for a couple of days and at the end of the fever, either you will drop it or we will join you and go on.” So that was what happened in 1998 and in the two years after that, we gathered people. We were scouting for talent over all of the various regions who knew the areas and presenters who signed on to present what we gathered–musicians and composers–and got together in a gorgeous spot in Tanglewood, Massachusetts, home of The Boston Symphony Festival and home of a lot of new music. That’s how the group was born, and the idea fifteen years later is that in getting together so many different people from different traditions, how do you work together, how do you eat together when you have so many people who eat different types of food and have different languages and habits. I think, as in joining the army fifty years ago, you just make things happen. The baseline is, “We’re going to make things happen.” What was interesting is that it’s not just the smartest person, the most virtuosic person, the most talented person; it’s more like that mixed with great generosity and compassion and sharing, so a system of values kind of emerged. Those values are what actually makes this group kind of stick together. So chief amongst the values is generosity, but within that world, you have words like collaboration, flexible thinking, imagination, leading all to innovation.

MR: A real nurturing process.

YYM: We kind of nurture that not only in ourselves, but as soon as we discover something, we like to share it, and sharing it means performing it or recording it; sharing it means teaching it but not teaching it as in “You do what I say,” but as in getting other people excited about something. “Look at what I’ve learned!” will translate into a passion for learning. Whether we are working with public school teachers, which we do with the Harvard institute, or with fifth graders, which is one of those transition years where if you make it to sixth grade, your chances of getting to high school is that much greater, whereas if you don’t, it’s almost guaranteed that you’re not going to make it to high school. That’s one of those adolescent years where a lot of things happen, so we try and work a lot to get to know that age in inner-city schools, in our urban areas, as well as out in the country. The other place we practice those values is we actively search for ways to think about where there are needs that are not met. We try and think about that in a very proactive way, talking to people who might become cultural entrepreneurs. Instead of saying, “Here are five jobs in your area,” we say, “Wait a minute, you’re really interested in that. Looks like there are some places that might need people like you, but there’s no such job or structure available. Are you willing to think about how you might serve those areas?” Through that, there’s developing the idea and even a field of cultural entrepreneurship not unlike the new field of social entrepreneurship, which didn’t exist ten years ago but now people go to school to study it. This is kind of a third area that we are thinking of studying and learning about and then trying to share that knowledge.

MR: This is beautiful, how you’re integrating the music, using it as a tool to be able to further socially important causes.

YYM: I think not only are the two agendas, to me, not mutually exclusive. I think that, for example, with the term “Art for art’s sake,” that’s actually what art always has been and I think we like to emphasize that it’s not art for art’s sake, it’s art for life‘s sake. All of art deals with the human brain space between life and death. In society and in politics and economics and in every field, we’re always dealing with that brain space between life and death. In the United States and other industrialized countries, we struggle so much to avoid ever thinking about death. We have insurance policies, we pretend we’re not going to die, we extend life but actually no matter how much we extend life, we’re going to die. One thing that helps us deal with that inevitable fact is recognizing our humanity. Recognizing that is not recognizing our frailty, it’s recognizing our strength.

MR: Beautiful, Yo-Yo. Have you always had that feeling or mission about your own music?

YYM: Ah, absolutely. I think that’s something that I’ve always sort of looked for. The answer, which I think every sentient being is always asking, is really, “What’s it all about? What’s it for?” Obviously, I don’t play concerts for the sake of saying, “Okay, we filled the hall, how great, boom, that’s the end.” No, it’s like whoever is sitting in some place, what are they getting out of it and what did they take away from it and what do they remember the next day and is that useful to them because otherwise, what I do would be totally the most disposable thing in the universe. “Done, okay, next.” We’re in this business to create connections and hence memories.

MR: Amazing. Okay, let’s get to the album. First of all, A Playlist Without Borders, what a great title. And what a great way to present a project, especially since we’re in the age of the playlist as opposed to albums. It’s so funny that you use that term, shifting the concept of a playlist back into the concept of an album, which I thought was pretty clever.

YYM: That’s very nice, thank you.

MR: On “Playlist For An Extreme Occasion,” what was the band’s impression of an extreme occasion?

YYM: I think our digital world is about essentially two numbers–zero and one–and it’s about patterns. The patterns are what is normal and what is abnormal. “Yes” or “no.” It goes back to the memory thing. If you do something that is “super-normal” as in “not normal,” then there’s a greater chance that it stays. The moment of creating life to something is when something extraordinary happens. We assume that life is something extraordinary, and something that’s living. I think Vijay [Iyer], who’s actually a phenomenal musician–didn’t he just win something? He put together all of these various instruments in a work that is so much a playlist in that they’re all of a certain length but an extreme occasion in the sense that these are unlikely bandfellows, these instruments. Cello and tabla. Galician bagpipe with the Chinese sheng. When was the last time you heard those two instruments together? But when you have that meeting and you make something kind of extraordinary with it, that sends a message, into the hall or into the ethos, the virtual universe that says, “Wow, not only can people meet randomly, but if you make that random connection meaningful, then something extreme happens.”

MR: That’s amazing. It almost seems like something like the Silk Road project is an example of how human behavior ideally should be as opposed to what’s being exhibited in, let’s say, Congress and what’s being taught to kids in a larger sense. It’s not about pettiness and selfishness; it’s about considering ramifications and effects on others. And by the way, how do you keep that energy and positivity going?

YYM: I think in some ways, it’s very simple: The things that we do, we feel that we’re responding to an unmet need in society. We’re creating space for that, so people realize, “Hey, this is a good thing, we might need to think that way.” What we’re doing is creating a space of thinking and the thinking is practiced by the values we use to do the things that we do. So it’s the collaboration part, the flexible thinking part, the imagination part leading to the innovation part. Those are the four values that I think people need to practice in any field at any time and especially now, whether it’s in politics or whether it’s in business or economics or whether it’s in the field of culture, which I think includes the arts and sciences. Arts, culture, humanity, arts and sciences. Culture is that which gives us meaning, that which gives us meaning that we get from close investigation into the nature of things. And specifically, we’re examining in our work our motivations. We’re examining our existence and what gives our existence meaning. We’re trying to understand truth as framed by code or visual material or narratives. What is the truth in the myths that we need to believe in, in order to have a society? Creation myths. All societies have them. All societies have music; all societies have a certain narrative. In the United States, we have the American dream and then we ask, do we still have the American dream? When we start to feel we no longer have the American dream, we feel all kinds of uncomfortable, but who created the American dream? What is the American dream? So we examine those things so that when we do something–let’s say we play “America The Beatiful” but with a lot of different kinds of instruments–it’s another statement in recognizing that change is not always bad for the traditionalists because the change sometimes allows traditions to survive and evolve, because if you don’t evolve, you die. I don’t care how traditionalist you are, my claim in culture is that any tradition we have is the result of change because it is the result of successful invention.

MR: Wow, beautiful, nicely said. By the way, when I saw the tracklist for this album, I also saw “Drag The Goat” and I’m like, “You mean, drag The Goat Rodeo.”

YYM: [laughs] That was an unintended connective tissue there that crossed its own border. But you know what? How great, because it’s totally an unintended connection, but it makes total sense.

MR: So what is Yo-Yo Ma’s future like? What are you doing beyond your Silk Road adventures? What’s your future looking like?

YYM: Well, I just turned fifty-eight.

MR: Excellent, congratulations.

YYM: So the future is a year older and I think I plan to play which, of course, is like brushing your teeth, you know? You never stop brushing your teeth. You don’t get to be such a world expert at brushing your teeth that don’t need to do that anymore. You always have to floss. That’s part of it. So as long as I’m going to play the cello, I have practicing in my future. But I think it’s in the realm of ideas, experiments, trying to understand things and really working in the areas of culture and education and trying to connect things that can be connected that will give the people who make the connections the greatest individuality and strength.

MR: Ridiculous question: Do you ever see yourself moving on from The Silk Road Ensemble?

YYM: No, I’m always going to be with the Silk Road project and I think it needs different kinds of leadership. I think as a fifty-eight year old, it would be kind of arrogant if I could claim, “Oh, I know what eighteen-year-olds are thinking about.” No, I need people to work with to try and understand what eighteen-year-olds are thinking. That’s like working across cultures. We inhabit the same space, but boy do they think differently.

MR: [laughs] The Silk Road Ensemble seems to be a great example for integration and cooperation to young people.

YYM: It’s wanting to make sure that a lot of young people that are without hope all across the world. I think we cannot live without hope. It’s a very grey world if there’s no hope, but hope can only exist if people can see a ladder towards hope. It’s not like, “Oh, hope is just there and it’s floating around.” There’s got to be some reality attached to hope. Right now, I don’t see too many places where societies feel very comfortable with everything that they are and that they’re doing. I think we need to look for possible ways of saying, “There’s a way for seven million people to be able to hope together,” that’s acknowledging all of the differences, and also acknowledging all of our individual strengths and how they can be incredibly defined for an even greater unity. That’s a struggle because there’s the social justice aspect of things. There are people talking about disparity of wealth, but I could talk about disparity of culture. Sometimes, the wealthiest people are people with the least culture. Sometimes, the strongest strongman is the person with the least humanity. So you get the reverse of everything. Sometimes, the person who is the most “human” could be the least clued in person in other affairs. So in fact, a really good world is one where the politics and the economics and the cultural spheres are actually mixing together and there’s a lot of common space and respect for the frame of each way of thinking. If you imagine three circles and the intersection like a Venn diagram, that’s the space that we want much more of so that we can avoid any one sphere failing and then dragging the other two down. We have to support one another and each one of those people, too. We tend to favor any one sphere domination of the other two and calling the shots but then not making the decisions that are good for the other two spheres and therefore, we all get dragged down by it. We have to combine together in order to be stronger.

MR: Too beautiful. Yo-Yo, what advice do you have for new artists?

YYM: Look for where the real needs are. Respond to need. No matter how great a society is, people fall through the cracks. Where are the cracks? Where are the edges? Artists are incredibly sensitive people, that means sometimes, we have a harder time because sometimes, their antenna are out and receiving all kinds of information that they need to do something about. When they do something about it, obviously, they need to find ways of self-expression. Dig deep into yourself in order to come up with your voice but then make sure you come out of yourself so that you actually attach yourself to the wide world and you can look at what the world is missing and use your sensitivity to not only identify it but then start to express and show a way forward, meeting those needs that are not being met. I think artists have always done that. I think that’s another way of putting that in a way that is not self-referential, as in, “That’s me, I need to be heard,” but rather it’s art for life’s sake. It’s really art for looking around at the living and seeing what the living need.

MR: And there we are back at “Art for life’s sake.”

YYM: That’s my advice for myself, anybody that wants advice, a younger person, or whoever because that’s always changing and you’re never competing for top dog, “I am bigger than you.” It’s not about the baubles, it’s really about how deeply you meet those needs. That is always individual. I think we can practice that and we’ll be happier. We’re miserable when we compare ourselves to others and yet we are totally a measuring and comparative society.

MR: Yeah, or more crudely put, a locker room society.

YYM: Exactly! And you do that when you have nothing better to do. You become a bully because you can. It does nothing to contribute to something constructive.

MR: Hey, let’s talk about Live From Tanglewood. What was it like during the performance, especially knowing you were being recorded for a DVD?

YYM: It was so satisfying to do it back at Tanglewood, which is where we started. A community opened themselves up to us fifteen years ago when all of us–not that we have money now, but–were volunteers driving musicians to people in the community who opened their homes to the musicians because we didn’t have money for hotels. We bought all the food and made the food. My family and other board members’ families were all essentially drafted into making it happen, so we’re very grateful to the grassroots community support as well as The Boston Symphony and the Tanglewood campus giving us the space and the facilities to rehearse and then to perform. So the obvious choice was to say, “Let’s do it back at Tanglewood,” which, of course, is so wonderful because it is open air; it’s a picture, it’s right smack in the middle of the mountains. It’s beautiful and what we’re doing is really an activity that revolves around understanding what nature is all about, whether it’s human nature or nature as in the imagination of nature. And as Richard Feynman, the physicist, used to say, “Nature is the one that has the greatest imagination, but she guards her secrets jealously.” Doing it there for the people that have supported us and in the place that supports the creation of new things, we felt really, really comfortable that this was the place to acknowledge that chapter in our life.

MR: Yo-Yo, I don’t even know where you go from there. It’s beautiful.

YYM: Like death. [laughs]

MR: [laughs] You are an amazing person and I can’t wait for our next interview.

YYM: It’s great to talk with you again. You take good care, keep writing, keep doing your good stuff, okay?

MR: All right, you too, sir.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne