Ma, Yo-Yo

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YO-YO MA

Born: Paris, France, 7 October 1955

Genre: Classical

One of the great cellists of the twentieth century, Yo-Yo Ma mastered the standard cello repertoire early in his career and then proceeded to engage in a series of dialogues with other art forms, cultures, and technologies. He uses his cello as a kind of admission ticket to a world of other cultures and collaborators. Although these explorations might seem the ramblings of a dilettante in the hands of a lesser artist, Ma's projects always ring with integrity and a spirit of discovery.

Born in Paris to Chinese parents, Ma began studying the cello at the age of four. At five he gave his first public recital, and at age nine moved to New York with his family and began lessons at the Juilliard School, where he studied with Leonard Rose. At the age of fifteen, Ma was featured in a concert by conductor Leonard Bernstein at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Instead of going to college to study music, Ma enrolled at Harvard College to study the humanities, spending summers at the Marlboro Music festival in Vermont. After graduating from Harvard in 1976, he became a full-time cellist, winning the prestigious Avery Fisher Prize in 1978.

Ma became a popular concerto soloist, performing with the world's great orchestras. He is also an accomplished chamber musician who has performed frequently with pianist Emmanuel Ax and violinists Isaac Stern and Jaime Laredo. Ax became Ma's regular partner, and the two toured and recorded extensively, collaborating on albums of the complete cello sonatas of Beethoven and Brahms.

A champion of contemporary music, Ma has premiered dozens of new works by composers such as John Corigliano, Stephen Albert, John Harbison, Leon Kirchner, William Bolcom, Tod Machover, Christopher Rouse, and John Williams.

In the 1990s Ma pushed beyond traditional classical music, teaming up with jazz singer Bobby McFerrin for an album of duets called Hush, which sold more than 1 million copies. He got together with bassist/composer Edgar Meyer and fiddler Mark O'Connor for two recordings of Appalachian country music. He recorded an album of Argentine tangos. And he recorded a children's album, Lulie the Iceberg, which tells a story about the environment.

Ma has worked with composer/inventor Tod Machover, a specialist in exploring and building virtual electronic instruments at MIT. Wiring up Ma while he played, Machover studied the cellist's subtle movements to understand how to build his own electronic instruments.

Ma also recorded the Bach solo cello suites. But instead of merely making a recording of music that many consider the ultimate cello pieces, Ma collaborated with a number of artists in multimedia interpretations. For the first suite he worked with a garden designer; the second suite explored the idea of great architecture and the work of the architect Piranesi; the third was a collaboration with choreographer Mark Morris; the fourth examined music's relationship with society; the fifth was an exploration of Kabuki; and the sixth was a collaboration with the ice dancers Torvill and Dean. The series was broadcast on public television.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, Ma embarked on his next major project—the Silk Road Project, an organization he founded to explore music and cross-cultural pollination along the route of the ancient Central Asian trade routes. Drawing on performers from many countries East and West, playing traditional and classical instruments, the group commissions work by composers from the region. The Silk Road company has toured extensively throughout America and Asia.

These various projects do not mean that Ma has abandoned the cello's traditional repertoire. He is in constant demand in the classical world and continues to perform traditional material. But his explorations into other music genres enrich all the music he performs.

In part, Ma's celebrity as a concert cellist helps make his musical excursions possible. He has been a guest on Sesame Street, has appeared in ads for Apple Computer and American Express, has been a regular performer on public television, and with his personable manner, has attained a crossover appeal in the popular culture.

Ma has made more than fifty recordings and has won fourteen Grammys. Among his many awards are an honorary doctorate in music from Harvard University and the National Medal of Freedom (2001). His cello playing is as warm, engaging, and natural as his personality; listeners are drawn to his music because of its sincerity and directness. Each new idiom he explores seems somehow an extension of a personal musical journey.

Spot Light: Yo-Yo Ma's "Duet" with the Hypercello

Yo-Yo Ma has made a career of expanding what he can do on the cello. So he was the right artist to participate in an early 1990s experiment with the "Hypercello," a creation of MIT composer/inventor Tod Machover. Ma was hooked up with censors on his wrist and fingers and on his bow. The motions were fed into a computer, where they were measured, analyzed, and then fed back in the form of musical responses to what Ma was playing. The Hypercello responded to all of Ma's movements, no matter how slight, sometimes transforming the sound he produced into something else. Or it would accompany what Ma was playing or create new musical lines and sounds, creating a kind of spontaneous, evolving duet. While the instrument was interacting with him, Ma could also respond to what his Hypercello was performing, looping the interactivity of music-making back on itself—a kind of improvisation wrapped inside an improvisation. The human/machine interaction yielded a sense of musical direction. Ma would begin a riff, hear the instrument add a bass accompaniment, and then adjust his line to continue the section. With his electronic instruments, Machover tries to develop ways of extending the musician's technique and interpretive gifts in a manner that sounds as "human" as possible. Ma, always looking for ways of expanding the possibilities for music-making on the cello, was an ideal human collaborator.

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

Bach: The Cello Suites Inspired by Bach, from the Six-Part Film Series (Sony, 1998); Yo-Yo Ma & Bobby McFerrin: Hush (Sony, 1992). With Emmanual Ax: Prokofiev/Rachmaninov: Sonatas for Cello & Piano (Sony 1991). With Edgar Meyer and Mark O'Connor: Appalachia Waltz (Sony, 1996).