Yo-Yo Ma

1955– CELLIST FRANCE AND UNITED STATES

His bow has a voice.

—YO-YO MA’S MOTHER

Concert attendees at the University of Paris held their breath, captivated by the five-year-old music prodigy on the stage. Yo-Yo’s fingers danced over the cello strings as he skillfully slid the bow across them with his other hand. He was approaching the end of the first suite of Bach’s Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello. He was supposed to stop when he finished the first section, but he found himself picturing the upcoming notes in his head—he’d memorized them the year before. He decided right then to play all six suites, no matter what the concert program said. At the end, the audience was thrilled, and so was Yo-Yo. His first public performance was a good taste for what the rest of his life as a musician would be like.

Yo-Yo Ma’s parents were poor musicians. They’d moved to Paris from China to escape the violence of their homeland, but after World War II, it was difficult for anyone to make a living in war-torn France. By the time Yo-Yo was born, his mother was trained in opera, but she wasn’t working, and his father had two jobs—teaching music at the University of Paris and giving private music lessons. Yo-Yo, his older sister, and his parents lived in a one-room apartment that didn’t even have any heat! But they surrounded themselves with the simple pleasures of classical music, especially Bach and Mozart.

By the time Yo-Yo could talk, he was making up his own songs—his favorite was about a frog—and he had a keen ear for tone. When he was just three years old, his sister had played in a violin recital, and when she asked Yo-Yo if he’d liked it, he replied, “You played very well. . . . But you were just a little off tone.”9 His parents were amazed—he was right. When they asked him how he knew when the sound was off, he shrugged. He just knew.

While many people use the words pitch and tone to mean the same thing, they are actually a little different. Pitch is how high or low a sound is. Tone, on the other hand, is the quality of the sound. A musician can be perfectly on pitch, but the tone can still sound bad—raspy, shrill, or piercing.

But Yo-Yo’s parents were nervous about training their son to be a musician. After all, they were both very good musicians and could barely provide food and shelter for their family. Still, they could see Yo-Yo was incredibly talented, and they fretted about stifling his gift. Finally, they decided to teach him music but not to pressure him to do it professionally as he grew older.

As anticipated, Yo-Yo made a very good music student, but he resisted learning the violin, as his father originally proposed. “I don’t like the sound violins make,” he said. “I want a big instrument.”¹⁰ After months of Yo-Yo making this claim, his father brought a small cello to one of their lessons. Yo-Yo was thrilled! From then on, Yo-Yo Ma would be known as a cellist.

When Yo-Yo was seven, his father spent all his savings to fly his family to the United States to visit his brother. Although they were in New York to take care of family business, Yo-Yo’s father took the opportunity to set up three concerts for his children. Just like at the University of Paris concert, everybody loved Yo-Yo. After the second concert, Yo-Yo’s father was reveling in the success of his children’s performance when a representative from the Trent School in New York City approached him and offered him a job teaching music and conducting a children’s orchestra. When he compared his family’s poverty in Paris with the American Dream this job offer represented, he quickly accepted.

Yo-Yo loved living in America. He studied happily and played the cello as much as he could. He began taking lessons from Janos Scholz, a well-known cellist, and even played once for renowned musician Pablo Casals, who suggested Yo-Yo participate in a fund-raiser that was coming up in Washington, DC.

In Chinese, yo means “friend” and ma means “horse,” so Yo Ma is “friendly horse.” Yo-Yo’s parents thought just one yo didn’t sound very musical, though, so they added another: Yo-Yo Ma.

The event would be a symphony conducted by Leonard Bernstein, and it would also be aired on the television special An American Pageant of the Arts. President John F. Kennedy had set it up in order to raise money for the national cultural center that was to be built in the nation’s capital. It was Yo-Yo’s first opportunity to play a cello solo with a symphony, and he was phenomenal. The nation loved him! Before long, he was invited to play on The Tonight Show.

By the time Yo-Yo was nine, his father was working at the French school Ecole Française, and Yo-Yo went to school there. When the parents and teachers decided to organize a fund-raiser concert for the school, they went all out and reserved Carnegie Hall, one of America’s most famous concert halls. Some of the parents, like Isaac Stern, were famous musicians themselves, so they performed first. Then Yo-Yo’s father directed the student orchestra, and finally, Yo-Yo and his sister played Sammartini’s G Major Cello Sonata. A New York Times reporter sat in the audience and later wrote, “This is no children’s piece, nor did they play like children. The performance had assurance, poise, and a full measure of delicate musicality.”

As Yo-Yo approached adolescence, he became more and more aware of the cultural differences between his strict, formal Chinese background and the informal, outspoken American ways. While he was expected to be silent at home, his teachers wanted him to speak up. His new cello teacher at the Julliard School, Leonard Rose, was just like his other teachers, and Yo-Yo was so intimidated, he initially tried to hide behind his cello. As time went on, though, Yo-Yo became more comfortable in all of these settings, and his musical talent continued to flourish.

At age fifteen, Yo-Yo was back at Carnegie Hall for his debut professional recital. Since then, he has performed professionally at famous concert halls around the world. Now he has been an exclusive Sony Classical artist for thirty years, releasing seventy-five albums in the process. He’s even won fifteen Grammy Awards!

But Yo-Yo never forgets the teachers he’s had along the way and the many children of the world who are as hungry for music teachers as he was. Every time he does a tour, he also sets up educational programs in the cities he’s visiting. He teaches master classes for advanced musicians and workshops for kids just getting started. He also helped launch Family Concerts at Carnegie Hall, a low-cost concert series that helps parents introduce their children to music from around the world.

HOW WILL YOU ROCK THE WORLD?

I plan to rock the world’s socks off. I want to do this with the power of medicine. Hopefully I will be a pediatrician. I will be putting a sense of security in the minds of parents. I will take care of their children because children are the future. They are the world. Eventually when we pass away, the only thing we leave behind is our bloodline. Since I want to be a pediatrician, I would ensure the safety of the future and its people.

BOBBY LAZZARA AGE 14