Ma strives to find connections that stimulate the imagination. Appointed a CultureConnect Ambassador by the United States Department of State in , he has trained and mentored thousands of students worldwide. In , Ma was named a U. Messenger of Peace. Yo-Yo was born in in Paris, France where his parents were working as struggling musicians. He began to study the cello with his father at age four and came with his family to New York two years later.
After graduating from Harvard, Ma was ready to shift his career into overdrive. But instead, it came to a halt when he was forced to undergo a risky back surgery for a severe case of scoliosis. He wore a body cast for six months and was not allowed to play at all during his recovery. Despite the risks of his surgery, the operation ended up being a success.
From then on, he was in high demand, sometimes booking concerts years in advance. Experimentation and innovation have become the hallmarks of Ma's career. His relentless pursuit of new challenges has brought classical music to a much larger audience than ever before.
In fact, while he is a classical musician, he is known for his versatility and wide-ranging interests in different musical genres. He's delved into Baroque pieces, American bluegrass, as well as traditional Chinese music. While the results may be open to question, his passion is not.
Over his decades-long career, Ma has produced more than 75 albums. He has been a Sony recording artist for three decades, and is considered one of Billboard's best classical sellers. Ma plays a Venetian 17th century Montagnana cello and the Davidoff Stradivarius.
In , Ma founded the Silk Road Project as a means to educate and study the culture and art that thrived on the Silk Road. The organization's vision, according to its website , is to "connect the world's neighborhoods by bringing together artists and audiences around the globe.
In , Ma was given the opportunity to expand his audience beyond his wildest dreams: Film director Ang Lee asked him to play on the sound track for the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon , which went on to become an astounding success, winning four Academy Awards in —for best foreign-language film, art direction, cinematography and, most importantly for Ma, best original score.
But Ma has also found time to perform in front of the cameras on the small screen. Despite how some movies may represent it, classical music has also always been known as a source of solace during times of tragedy, and when the United States needed it most, Yo-Yo Ma delivered. Out of these early encounters emerged the Silk Road Ensemble, a peripatetic collective of musicians from 17 countries that fluctuates in size from 12 to 32 members.
In addition, the project has produced films and sponsored storytelling performances, open rehearsals, exhibitions, festivals and lectures about the Silk Road region to audiences around the world.
Soon after forming the Silk Road Project, Ma realized that the existing repertoire of music blending Eastern and Western instruments was limited, so in he and a panel of composers, musicians and musicologists began commissioning 20 new works by composers from nine Silk Road countries.
Weaving together traditional instruments from many cultures, their contemporary compositions draw from hypnotic Sufi trance music, exuberant Uzbek folk chants and thunderous Korean drumming, updating musical traditions that go back more than 3, years. After rehearsing and polishing the new compositions in the United States and France, the Silk Road Ensemble, with Ma as artistic director, kicked off a month world tour last August in Germany.
The ensemble will go next to Washington, D. Yo-Yo Ma was born in in Paris, to which his parents had emigrated from China. His father, a composer, violinist and musicologist, taught Europeans about Chinese music. Before Ma left for the United States, he made his professional debut at the University of Paris on both the cello and the piano.
Yo-Yo gave his first performance at Carnegie Hall at Two years later, Ma began his studies in humanities at Harvard; during college summers he performed at the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont. There he started dating Jill Hornor, a student at MountHolyoke. The two were married in and now have two children— Nicholas, 19, and Emily, Since the earliest days of his music career, he has performed with major orchestras and toured internationally as soloist, recitalist and chamber musician.
Widely acclaimed for his interpretations of the Bach suites, Ma broke new ground in when he made six films exploring each of the suites, collaborating with artists from other disciplines: choreographer Mark Morris, filmmaker Atom Egoyan and garden designer Julie Moir Messervy.
Ma has also explored the traditional music of Appalachia and the Argentine tango. Perhaps because of his own background, Ma has been particularly intrigued by the intersections of cultures—how Roman glass ended up in a Hanoi museum, or how silk can be found in ancient burial sites in Egypt, or why folk songs in Xianjiang in western China are similar to songs in Hungary.
In music, you learn that different phrasing, timing, rhythms mean very specific things. In classical Azerbaijani music, the goal is to transport you to a different place. Levin, who brought Billy Joel to the former Soviet Union, and central Asian musicians to Washington in the s, agrees. On the outskirts of karachi, pakistan, mark kenoyer is looking for trucks. Painted trucks. Wildly decorated trucks. Trucks as art. A University of Wisconsin anthropology professor and codirector of the Harappa Archaeological Research Project, Kenoyer is one of 50 roving fieldworkers who have fanned out along the ancient Silk Road to recruit artists and craftspeople for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival.
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