Perhaps the world music concept should be reinvented since Yo-Yo Ma (Paris, 1955) dedicates herself body and soul to visiting world cultures and distilling not only their music but also their wisdom, so that it contributes to saving the planet. Normalizing contact with nature would be a big change, says the Chinese-born French-American cellist.
His is an unshakeable faith in the power of culture to heal a world in crisis. Whether it is with that marriage of music from different latitudes that he himself promotes, or with the fabulous excursions he makes to natural parks such as the Smoky Mountains, in the United States, where he comes into contact with the locals: Cherokee musicians, bluegrass, African-Americans , storytelling…
“The idea is to acquire the knowledge of people who have practiced ancient ways of living and who can open our eyes to how we face the future and build a world that is meaningful as well as productive.”
For this multicultural quality, for his approach to all genres and his altruism with other communities and styles, he will be awarded the Birgit Nilsson prize tomorrow in Stockholm, the other Nobel Prize in music, the best endowed in classical music (with a million dollars ). The first, the also Swedish Polar Music Award, has been held by Yo-Yo Ma –in addition to twenty Grammys– since 2013, along with myths such as Rostropovich, Isaac Stern, Bob Dylan or Patti Smith.
On the 25th, the living cello legend opens the BCN Clàssics cycle at L’Auditori de Barcelona together with the British pianist Katrhyn Stott (tickets can be purchased at a discount for subscribers on the La Vanguardia ticket website). On the 26th she stops with this same program (Schumann, Falla…) at the National Auditorium in Madrid. And he attends La Vanguardia from New York.
In a week he will play in the Pau Casals room. Excited?
Much. I am impatient to return to Barcelona.
How does the example of Casals survive as an artist committed to peace and democracy?
His life has been one of my greatest inspirations. When I was nine years old I read his autobiography Joys and Sorrows [by Albert Kahn] and I knew that he thought of himself first as a human being, second as a musician and third as a cellist. And for a kid who came from a family that placed great emphasis on music, hearing that was precious, it marked me for life. A couple of weeks ago I attended the John F. Kennedy library exhibition at the Kennedy Center in Washington… and it was clear that the concert Casals gave at the White House had become the iconic representation of the place he occupied culture in the Kennedy administration. It was a great lesson about what someone who first sees himself as a human being and citizen tried to do in action, thought and music to live under his ideals. And I cannot think of a better example for all of us in a world that faces challenges: social justice, gender equality, climate and everything that has to lead us to social balance. It is necessary that philosophers, scientists, artists, journalists get together and consider what world we are building.
And where would Yo-Yo Ma have to play today as a rallying cry against the war in Ukraine?
Bernstein used to say that what we can do in a moment of crisis is to do what we do but with greater passion. And I think that Birgit Nilsson was the example of someone who put all the passion but between tours she always went back to her town, to the farm. She lived in harmony with nature and made sure that she, whatever she did, in the case of her opera, she was part of nature. Humans have separated from nature to take advantage of its fruits, and what Nilsson says is that if we thought we were part of it, we would make different decisions.
Classical music is the art that unites the sides in this war.
Classical music is a combination of enlightenment, philosophy and thought. In the classical era it was a way of theorizing about the relationship between the individual and society. The wars we have now have a lot to do with going back to those basics: what is a nation? and a political identity? why should there be a state? Is human nature a good thing or a bad thing? There has been a great boom in nationalism in the last hundred years. The illustration gave us a lot but there is one thing that we lost along the way, and that is the relationship with nature. And another thing that was separating us was knowledge in the form of the tower of babel: we build so much that we can no longer talk to each other because we do not know each other’s languages ??or their perspective. If we used our hearts, we could make better mutual decisions. And the music is effective: it joins the head to the heart, opens another imaginary space and you come back with another perspective. In a concert many people go through the same state of mind at the same time, you see them keep silent before a spiritual achievement, they can’t even move, they try to understand that state of mind and everyone around them shares that. There is some magic in that.
Thinking about your country of origin, China, and the repression that Shostakovich suffered in the USSR, for example… how stimulating is it for you to know what he was going through?
I never play it without thinking about what he tried to do with his music: give a voice to repressed people. Wherever there is a repressive system, secret languages ??arise. Even my children confess to me that when we sent them to sleep they had a secret code to communicate, haha. And Shostakovich had his for the Russians who knew what he meant. People are incensable.
He was the cellist with whom Barenboim once again conducted the emblematic Elgar Concerto in the hands of the ill-fated Jacqueline du Pré. How does he remember it?
He probably decided in his heart that it was okay to do so, and he did. The most amazing thing was that she had an exact memory, a muscular, tactile, sensitive memory of the way she touched Jacquie. And from then on, whether it was a Beethoven sonata or a Brahms sonata, he would say to me, “Yo-Yo, look at finding that shortcut, Jacquie used to do it”. Or in the Dvorák Concerto: “Use the strings in the air, Jacquie used to do it that way”. And he’s not about changing the color, he’s more of an engineer: “He uses two different fingers on those three notes, because he’ll give us another color.” It was amazing. A perfect example of culture transmission.
The teacher is about to celebrate 80…
That’s right, in November. I went to see him a couple of weeks ago, because he has that neurological disease, and I told him: “You are going to be 80 and when you were five you played with people from 80, and if those people remembered their 70s…, and thus towards the past, they would take you to the 18th century. Which means you contain the entire history of classical music.”
And what did he reply?
Typically, he stares at you, makes it clear that he has heard you. After that experience with him and Jacquie I already know what it’s like to embody someone who is no longer with us. That is the culture.
He said that the transmission of generation and generation would take us to the eighteenth century. Jordi Savall would be at the same time and predecessor of Casals for the ancient repertoire with period instruments but also his successor… What inspires you?
I love what you’ve done. He has legions of fans and people who follow his musical reconstruction drinking from all possible sources, both instrumental and text. We are talking about one of the golden periods of the history of Spain, when Muslims, Christians and Jews lived together, and he shows us how things were. He gives us a perspective through a sound, oral, tactile sense that we could not otherwise have. We could only read about it but not hear it.
Do you feel more grounded having Savall’s viola da gamba as a predecessor to your cello?
Totally. In our world we celebrate what we know but the deeper you come to a knowledge, the more you realize that you know nothing. I know that I know a lot about the cello, but the more I know the more I realize that I am a speck of dust in a great world of knowledge. And what I appreciate about Savall is that, if we feel that the universe is an empty space, with him a new point of light has been set.
How does an artist deal with a business and marketing society like the US?
Being a musician is like being three people in one: the composer’s advocate, the communicator of that content and the first receiver. Marketing ends when the person has bought the ticket to go to the concert. And my receiving part is something I spend time thinking about. Because for me it doesn’t end when the public gets up and leaves. In fact it is like the delivery of a living DNA that acquires a biological and cultural meaning. Culture is a living material. So the marketing part ends when the cultural connection begins. Culture is not a business, it is not a political strategy, it must contribute to healing the world.
His playing on the cello is pure expression and warmth. One of the criticisms that she has had to listen to is that her sound is too pretty. What does she think?
I have been criticized for everything, for ugly sound, for beautiful sound… I think sound is an interesting topic. Because it is much more than you can measure technically, much more than the nuances, the quality, the beginning, the middle, the end, the synthesized, the acoustic, the Stradivarius, etc. It’s when you can combine different sounds that things get interesting. A series of sounds reflects a constantly changing strategy, the choices of the composer, the transmission of ideas and feelings and structures. And yes, I get a beautiful sound, but I work hard before playing Shostakovich. I think, let’s see, wait a minute, it’s not about a traditionally beautiful sound, you have to find another sound. But when you play Elgar… if you play it like Brahms it sounds raw, you have to look for the Elgar sound. You have to find the sound of the world you are trying to represent. It is a life dedicated to verifying, as Jordi Savall does, playing the viola da gamba or other ancient instruments… An attempt to see the connection between the lute and the pipe, for example, between the viola family… or between the guitar and the sitar You try to find out how a family or species of instruments evolves in time and geographic space. How it changes in different environments.
Any record project?
I don’t know. We have premiered a piece by Paquito de Rivera for clarinet, cello and pipa entitled Rice and Beans, because we were joking about his childhood in Havana, where there was a large Chinese community, and one day he wrote to me from a Chinese restaurant in Manhattan: “You will be the rice and I will be the bean”, ha ha. Is beautiful.
What’s the next stop on your route through the national parks?
In December we go to Hawaii to watch whales, because with their sounds, whales are incredibly communicative, they are a very social species. We will talk to the people who do maritime navigation, who will explain to us how without tools they can travel throughout the Pacific only guided by the stars and the whales. The idea is to learn, I don’t know if it will end up in a recording, but it is about how to acquire knowledge from people who have practiced ancient ways of living and who can open our eyes about how we face the future. Artists, musicians, people who farm or make things.
Talking goes beyond making music to solve the environmental problem.
At the beginning we asked ourselves what you and musicians like you can do to face one of the biggest problems in the world. And I try to explore and bring to the conversation all the possibilities that we have and could have, and how we could use that knowledge in the same way that people did at the beginning of the illustration. That is, let us reimagine who we are together, fearlessly allowing all that people have discovered and created and invented to come together without conflict. See how we can use all of that to build the world we want to live in. The invitation includes above all the youth, the youth who have different values ??than those of us who are baby boomers, who believe that they want another kind of world in which environmental exploitation is not toxic, a life in which social justice exists. Yes, it is aspirational, but if we don’t have aspirations, what are we working for? Illustration is something we build based on an idea, and it’s time to ask ourselves what is the best we can build now given our knowledge.
The program that he performs with Kathryn Stott on the 25th in Barcelona and on the 26th in Madrid has a lot of intergenerational chaining: from Mendelssohn to Caroline Shaw; from a Jewish prayer to Sibelius or Dovrák, from Violeta Parra to Piazzola…
It is a reflection of what we just talked about. It’s about what we have. Classical music is a form of literature, it allows us to connect worlds, it gives us the tool of language and the learning of that language. It doesn’t make me an expert, but it does allow me to say, “Hey, look at what I’ve learned.” I have had the privilege of traveling and meeting very interesting people, and in my travels that is what I have found. And you can count on Kathryn and I to do our best.
