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On Being with Krista Tippett

Yo-Yo Ma — Music Happens Between the Notes

On Being with Krista Tippett

On Being Studios

Sociology, Spirituality, Religion & Spirituality, Krista Tippett, Arts, Culture, On Being, Society, Society & Culture, Science, Social Sciences

4.710.2K Ratings

🗓️ 5 July 2018

⏱️ 52 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The great cellist shares his philosophy of living. Turning fear into joy. Performance as hospitality and communal witnessing. Beauty as a transfer of life. Sound as visual. How music makes us better. And being a firm believer in accidental meetings. Yo-Yo Ma is a citizen artist and a forensic musicologist, decoding the work of musical creators across time and space. In his art, Yo-Yo Ma resists fixed boundaries, and would like to rename classical music just “music” — born in improvisation, and traversing territory as vast and fluid as the world we inhabit. In this generous and intimate conversation, he shares his philosophy of curiosity about life, and of performance as hospitality. Yo-Yo Ma has won 18 Grammy Awards and is the recipient of the National Medal of Arts, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the inaugural Fred Rogers Legacy Award. His newest album is “Brahms: The Piano Trios,” released with Emanuel Ax and Leonidas Kavakos. His most recent release with the Silk Road Ensemble is featured on the soundtrack to Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s documentary “The Vietnam War.”

Transcript

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0:00.0

On Being is brought to you by the John Templeton Foundation.

0:03.6

The Templeton Foundation supports academic research and civil dialogue on the deepest, most

0:08.6

perplexing questions facing humankind.

0:11.4

Who are we?

0:12.4

Why are we here?

0:13.6

And where are we going?

0:15.2

To learn more, please visit Templeton.org.

0:18.2

The Templeton Foundation.

0:19.7

Stay curious.

0:20.7

While I'm on stage, you are all my guests because that's sort of like the un-set agreement.

0:31.9

So while you're my guest, if something bad happens on stage, I often think of Julia Child.

0:37.7

You know?

0:38.7

Oh, the chickens fall down the floor.

0:41.5

Yes.

0:42.5

Oh, pick it up and put it right back.

0:44.9

I think, you know.

0:45.9

And you know what?

0:46.9

Everybody's with you.

0:48.1

Right.

0:49.1

You practice for on the engineering side that fails.

0:54.2

It's all right because we have a greater purpose.

0:57.2

The greater purpose is that we're communing together and we want this moment to be really special

...

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