Everybody knows Yo-Yo Ma’s beautiful music can deliver profound messages, but few people know his eloquent words also have the same impact. Recently, I read his interview with New York Time, in which he talks about the meaning of life. It’s a very enlightened interview. It covers a wide range of topic: music, culture, current and future. Following are some best parts of it.
Do you think music is fundamentally good?
That’s a good question to ask and very hard to answer. It’s as if you’re asking me “Are people fundamentally good?” I don’t think people are fundamentally bad. But in the interaction of figuring things out or wanting more of something or less of something, then complex things come into play.
I ask because your work is rooted in the idea of music as a value-positive enabling thing, but music is also used in every possible awful context. Can we delineate music from the intentions of the people using it?
Music connects human beings. It brings people together. You can also describe it as energy: sound that moves air molecules. So a marching band will energize an athletic game or bring people to war. The bagpipe is used for war, for entertainment, for funerals, for weddings. Music is not one thing. It’s something that people react to.
I’ve been wondering if in the past I had too easily allowed myself to believe that engaging with music — or culture more generally — was also a way of engaging with politics. In the sense that doing so was implicitly promoting humanistic values or empathy. Now I can’t help thinking that was at least partly a complacent waste of time, and while I was doing that, some parallel Neanderthal was probably spending the equivalent time figuring out how to advance odious politics. Is my rambling making any sense to you?
Of course it makes sense. It’s about whether you believe in a utilitarian world or you believe that if you look out on the night sky, you see the infinitude of variety in nature and the unreachable wonders of what it is and how we fit in. Morons are generally not thinking about the infinitude of the universe. They’re thinking of a different world. And you have to be able to extract certain truths. When you write something that’s beautiful, you think you’ve found a bit of truth. It flows. It sings.
I know the lady who spent 20 years helping to find the so-called God particle, the Higgs boson. Is that useful? I just read this piece that says that Newton, because of the bubonic plague, had to leave university and went back to the family farm, and during that time he developed all these incredible theories that we are the beneficiaries of hundreds of years later. Is that useful?
Physics is useful. Is spending years overvaluing the political utility of art?
All I’m saying is, if you dropped out and just focused on politics, then where are you drawing from? Where are your inner resources? What’s going to keep you going for 50 years? And do you know that you’re actually going to make more of a difference by focusing on politics than on the culture you’re passionate about? You don’t know what you might help make happen. Our world is full of the result of unintended as well as intended consequences. The two naturally go together.
I can’t tell if the way you answered my earlier question about cultural appropriation — by talking about anthropology and getting beyond a post-enlightenment perspective — is just how your mind works or was a noble way of sidestepping a potentially controversial subject.
Well, subjects are controversial for a reason. This is something that people have to argue out. I can tell you, my mind is very weird. The bushmen of the Kalahari desert — I actually studied them, and I loved that group.I spent time there. And the thing — I’ll give you the fast takeaway — is that they did trance dancing. They did this dance for hours. Women in a circle clapping; they got into trance. The next day, I interviewed the women and said, “Why do you do this?” They gave me the answer, “Because it gives us meaning.” Their answer has been my answer for culture since that time. I’m not a crackpot person. I am absolutely a science-based, evidence-based person. But because of the practice of music, I delve into the inner life of whatever we are. I don’t have any answers, but I keep poking around to try to figure out a little bit more.
During the pandemic, people, as always, turned to music for solace. Have you noticed common denominators in music that comforts?
I’ve been asking myself all my life, “What is the purpose of music?” It’s like trying to find the meaning almost every day, because the purpose yesterday may not be the purpose today. What the pandemic has crystallized in my mind is that we need music because it helps us to get to very specific states of mind. It’s not like, “Listen to my music; it will help.” But rather, everybody wants to get to certain states of mind during the day, during the cycle of the season. And during a pandemic, with the alienation of not having social contact, music is also that physical force. It’s energy. Then you get to more complex things, like how certain songs elicit memory. Certain smells can get to an immediate childhood memory of your grandmother’s baking apple pie. Music can do the same thing. Your first kiss. Your wedding. And unfortunately, during this time, we’ve lost a number of friends, and you have virtual memorial services and you play music for that. All of which is to say that you do whatever is needed with music. We need music to make us feel at equilibrium through hard times and good times.
Where does emotion come into this (Bach’s Cello Suites)? What does this have to do with healing or solace?
Let’s say if you’re depressed and you’re stuck, you’re essentially kind of paralyzed. Your neurons are operating at low level and low capacity. Music is a stimulus. You respond to it, but you’re responding subconsciously to something that makes your brain active.
So the ingenuity of Bach’s music fires the neurons, which causes positive feelings?
Exactly. In a way, it’s the Socratic method: Musically, the Suites are asking, “How would you find an answer?” Maybe that’s all a fantasy of mine, but the evidence is that people find something in this music. I know I do.
More broadly, how do you think about the specific environment in which you’re playing music?
For me as a musician, I try to be aware of where I am. As a performer, my job is to make the listener the most important person in the room. The only way to avoid burnout is to care about where you are. My good friend Manny Ax would always say to me that it doesn’t matter what you did yesterday; if you’re here today, that’s what counts. Being present. Caring. You’re working with living material. That goes back to memory. The living material is only living if it is memorable. Not only that it’s memorable but that you pass it on. That is what I’m thinking about with every single interaction. Whether it’s a kid, someone on the street, in a concert hall or with you, David. It’s the same thing: How to be present. Because if you’re not?
Then why are we here?
That’s it. You are acknowledging someone’s existence by being present. It may take a lot more energy, but boy, is it much more rewarding. It makes me happy. It makes people happy. It’s wonderful.
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