Yo-Yo Ma Interview 2000

Ran: 12/1/00 on CDNOW.com
Head: Yo-Yo Ma Bridges Musical Worlds

Yo-Yo Ma is a supremely talented cellist who has achieved crossover popularity without compromising his music principles or even standards of good taste. Fluent in the warhorses of the standard repertoire (concertos, chamber music, and solo), contemporary composers both challenging and ingratiating, and Baroque music, he's even successfully tackled such far-flung genres as tango, bluegrass, and various Asian styles. Ma's discography is approaching 50 albums, and he's won 13 Grammy awards. His popularity is such that even in this current profit-driven corporate period, Sony allows him considerable leeway.

Ma's ability to bring great music to the masses is epitomized by his upcoming appearance on the December 13 episode of the TV series The West Wing -- more than a cameo, as he'll be in several scenes -- that will find him playing Bach's Suite in G major for solo cello to probably its largest single audience ever.

The friendly, thoughtful, soft-spoken Ma spoke with CDNOW as part of the promotional effort for the latest release to feature him, Tan Dun's soundtrack to the acclaimed Ang Lee film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, discussing not only recent projects but more philosophical issues.

CDNOW: You are involved in such a wide variety of music, yet you always seem comfortable in any context.

Yo-Yo Ma: For me, the genesis of any sort of organic artistic experience is, you have to start from the inside. It doesn't matter what part of the inside, but just from the inside, because only from there can you then grow organically and perceive something. And we all know people who are always looking at something from the outside, who can't get in there. You can surround the thing that you're looking at with so many things on the outside, you never find your way in -- it's always a foreign experience. The only way to make it part of you is to actually jump in.

How about music that's more abstract? Say, 12-tone music.

Twelve-tone music is a methodology that people compose in. In one of Schoenberg's piano concertos, it's a waltz, a 12-tone waltz, so he went into it in that way. I mean, there's always a way to do it. And you always know that there're things that you don't understand, but also know that as time marches on, there's the possibility that one day you might understand. And only when I start to understand can I actually advocate for something.

When I was 15 I had just given a recital, spent a year working on it, and just the next lesson Leonard Rose says, "Here's this late Beethoven sonata, and I'm not going to tell you anything about it. You just go and work on it and play it." So I did. I thought it was beautiful, but I couldn't find my way in. It wasn't until three or four years later in college that somehow I figured out one thing about that piece, which was that there was no sort of actual tonic cadence for the longest time. And just that one thing got me into sort of, this is, "Oh so that's what he's fooling around with, that's what he's dealing with." 'Cause it's sort of like swimming around tonic-dominant, but you don't know what to grab for. So that's an abstract concept, it's the denial of something.

You studied with Leonard Rose for quite a while, starting when you were around seven?

Age of nine.

Is there anything in particular, beyond just specific techniques of playing, that you took away from that experience?

Love and patience. He was a great cellist, of course, a master, a great musician, all of that. He was so kind, he was so gentle, he was so loving. And that's what stays with you. And specific things such as, after this recital, he would say -- and later on, when we did some mentor-and-protégé talks and stuff like that -- where he would articulate and say, one of the most important parts of being a teacher is to say to a student when you have to learn to teach yourself, you've got to fly on your own. And he stayed a friend and mentor all the rest of his life, for which I'm very grateful -- but I think [of] the patience and love, and saying, "I know you can do it." I tell you, that kind of positive --you know, with high standards -- nurturing was so important. Because if he had said to me, "I think you stink. You'll never make it," I know that it would be totally devastating to me, and I probably would not have had the courage to go do a lot of things that I went and did later on because I felt supported. Someone believed in me.

Emanuel Ax went to Columbia, you went to Harvard. Did the Ivy League connection have anything to do with you guys hooking up, or perhaps on a different level, the fact that you have relate so well?

That has something to do with it. I think there are a number of factors that made us friends and made us want to work together over such a long period of time. One of them is that we were born in another country other than the United States. He was born in Lwow, which was part of the Soviet Union, Poland, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire at various times, so he understands what it's like to be on the inside and on the outside of cultures. [He] then went to Winnipeg, then went to New York. I was born in Paris, my parents are Chinese, I lived in New York, now I live in Boston. So we have that kind of immigrant, newly arrived kind of background.

Manny's one of the most loyal people I've ever met, a loyal friend, and that's very important. And I think rather than the goal, the process is very important to us, how we get there is extremely important. And that probably is the most important thing to us. And the fact that we both have families, and that we've talked so much about the struggle of, you know, just touring while trying to keep some semblance of regular life, and what we do without children and all that, similar goals for family, emphasis on nurturing and education, but not kind of sitting down on our kids so much that it stifles their growth, but then a sense of humor. You know, all of those things I think help, and I think the schooling, yes. Manny actually writes very well. I don't, but I admire the fact that he was able to do that, study French at Columbia, and yeah, these things do keep us going strong.

Your involvement in the soundtrack for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon presumably came about through Tan Dun. Was there any different approach because it's a soundtrack?

Well, I love Tan Dun. I love what he does and have great sympathy for it, for his music. We had worked together once before on a piece called Symphony 1997 and recorded somewhat the same ways. This was done in the studio, cello/voice alone and then afterwards he went and put it all together. Because I have sympathy for his music -- I think this only could have worked under those circumstances, I knew he's a great melodist, he's a very evocative, a very theatrical composer, and I said, "Look, you've gotta tell me, even though it's not quite written yet, what you're thinking of so that at least I can go there with you in an imaginative way."

And Ang Lee was also there, and so he was able to give his input after years of shooting, sometimes under incredibly difficult circumstances. I hadn't seen the film, saw little snippets of it, but he could give a sense of what he needed. And so in that studio on that evening, we were able to put together, hopefully, what was a form of expression that matched with what I knew of Tan Dun's work and what he was still to imagine, what was gonna be done later on, with what Ang Lee and James Schamus had been thinking of for years and what that was gonna be like. It was actually a fascinating meeting. I treasure that moment, those late hours in the night [laughs] when we were recording. And of course when I saw the film, I saw what a magnificent job they did.

Are there any particular qualities in John Corigliano's music that prompted you to commission Phantasmagoria?

I've known John forever, and the pieces he's written -- his Symphony, Violin Concerto -- and this is before Red Violin -- and also of his Dad and, you know, the New York Philharmonic. All of that stuff was always percolating. I was thinking it would be really neat to get him to write a piece. And the occasion came when there was a new auditorium that was opening at the Freer-Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian. And somehow the person who dedicated the auditorium was very much involved in music and wanted to commission a piece, and that's how it came about. I was very happy that he took that music from his opera, The Ghosts of Versailles, and kind of made an instrumental short version of that piece.

Do you think that one of the reasons that it works is that the cello is so close to the human voice and it's operatic music?

That could be one reason, but I think John is so knowledgeable on all kinds of instrumentation that it's, that, you know, he could've made anything work. I of course would like to think that it's because of the cello that it works! [laughs]

Philip Glass Interview 2002

Ran: 10/8/02 on CDNOW.com
Head: Philip Glass Teams with Godfrey Reggio and Yo-Yo Ma for Naqoyqatsi

Philip Glass, the most famous Minimalist, has long excelled at scoring films, most memorably Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi. Now the series becomes a trilogy with Naqoyqatsi, featuring cellist Yo-Yo Ma. Glass discusses the unusual path to the album's creation and how he's allowing more emotion into his music in recent years.

CDNOW: Has your method of collaborating with Godfrey Reggio changed over the course of the three Qatsi films?

Philip Glass: It's changed in that the films have changed somewhat. As they've become more technical, the process of making the film, of finalizing the images, has become more complicated. Even if we start working together, which is what we do, I start writing and he starts filming or making pictures, but I'm now working faster than him, so I'm working way ahead of the picture now. Originally it was shooting in 35 and editing the old way with strips of film on the walls, stuff like that. He made this movie on an AVIT. Eighty percent of it is computerized images. So while I was writing the music, I was rarely writing to finished film. That meant that the music began to take a forward position in the sense of determining how the outcome of the combination of image and music would be in the end. In the end, they were cutting pictures to music.

One of the hallmarks of these films is the rhythm, visual and musical. So now he's doing that to your music, rather than vice versa?

It's pretty much become that, though I still work with Godfrey in terms of the whole dramaturgical treatment we work on. Our studio is here, his studio was down on White Street and Broadway, eight blocks from here, so I was there numerous times in the course of a week watching the editor, John Kane, looking at what the pictures were. Let's say we had a scene, which we call "masked man" or something like that, and I would be looking at the images he was working with, so I knew what the pictures would be and I could get a certain sense of what the flow could be. But I actually didn't see a final version of it until a few days ago when I went to the opening in Telluride when I went to the film festival. That process is a very laborious one, of creating images that way.

How did Yo-Yo Ma come to be involved?

It was a surprise that came towards the end. Sony got interested in the soundtrack, and I was speaking with Peter Gelb, who's the head of Sony Classics. I worked with Sony Classics in the '80s, I had a contract with them for about 10 years. That was with CBS, and when it became Sony, then I went over to Nonesuch and spent 10 years with them. So I have already 11 or 12 CDs with [Sony]. Peter Gelb liked the idea of doing it and suggested it would be really wonderful if Yo-Yo could play on it, which I of course immediately agreed with, it would be wonderful. A few weeks later, Yo-Yo was in town and we met and I showed him the music and he was very interested. Oddly enough, I had written a lot of solo music already for the piece. That was one of the ideas of the piece, there's a whole section at the end. That whole solo cello piece at the end was written before I met him. After that, there were some uncompleted sections that were mostly transitions, and I decided to wrote solo pieces for Yo-Yo to tie the sections together. Then I went back, and Michael Reisman, who's the conductor, we went back to the score and identified places where the solo cello could take over certain sections, so it appears now as a piece that's kind of through-composed with the cello. In fact, it came rather late, and because of the direction the music had already taken, it was easy to make that happen. At this point, the cello seems almost like a subtext of the music, it seems like almost the voice of the music.

Voice is exactly the word, because he has such a vocal quality in his tone.

That's right. There's one section towards the end where there's a woman singing, and he plays along with her and it sounds like a man and a woman. You get that feeling especially when you hear him playing two octaves apart from the woman's voice. That was a very fortunate outcome of working with Sony, which we hadn't thought about. I knew he recorded with Sony, of course, but it never occurred to me that he would be interested. But this is a man who's interested in all kinds of things, he has his Silk Road projects. He's pretty much covered the concert literature, so he's very much moving into new things to do.

One of the interesting things about him playing this work it that it makes whatever emotions there are in the work much more overt than has been the case with your other Qatsi soundtracks.

All the movies have a certain look to them, and so the music is influenced by that. In a certain way, for me, there's a very traditional relationship of the instrument to melodic writing and rhythms in this piece more than in the other pieces. The film itself is very high-tech, and I felt that the music needed to supply a bridge, or kind of a door, for people to enter into it. I was afraid that the film could be seen as rather cold and distant, the way a fabricated image might be, so my desire was to balance what could have been the coolness of the image with a very warm sound, and it's for that reason I picked a large orchestra and, eventually, Yo-Yo. So in that sense it would remind us of more traditional kinds of writing than you would hear in Powaqqatsi or Koyaanisqatsi, and that was a strategy that had to do with film. Besides that, in recent years I have been allowing a very melodic dimension and emotional dimension, I've allowed that much more than in the early music.

It's very prominent in the Fifth Symphony.

Yes, that's true, it was, and that's a recent piece. This piece and the Fifth Symphony are only two or three years apart. I think partly it's just the way people develop. If a painter starts painting on one side of the room, he ends up painting on the other side of the room. I began [with] a very abstract music, the early reductive pieces, and I ended up doing very emotional music. If I'd done that the other way, I may have gone to the more abstract music. You have to go down the line one way or another; whether you move from left to right or right to left, it really doesn't matter very much, you're going to have to move somewhere. In my case, I had begun with a very abstract music; a lot of its emotional impact came from the dynamic of the music and the instrumentation and the rhythmic power of the music. Having done that, I found at a certain point I had to try new materials to kind of keep a musical vision that would remain fresh for me.

I play the early pieces quite a lot now; I'm playing a piano concert this weekend. I'm playing the pieces I wrote 20 years ago much better now than I played them then, because I really understand them now. I didn't understand them when I wrote them. I mean, there's a part of them I didn't get, and now 20 years later I can go back to pieces like the Metamorphoses and I play them very differently than when I wrote them. You can only really start addressing these kind of questions when there's a body of work that's substantial enough and that has come into the world over a length of time that's long enough so that you can actually become aware of your own process, which is also difficult to do. In my thirties and forties I had very little idea what I was doing, though in fact it included all the kind of writing that led to Satyagraha and Koyaanisqatsi. So when I say I didn't know what I was doing, what I meant to say is what the implications of the music might have been in terms of performance and in terms of audience and in terms of development. Like everybody else, usually I'm where I am, I'm not really able to envision things beyond that very much. Of course, the thing is, once you know where it's going, you tend to go there, and then you're in that moment, and that's how it works. It's very hard not to do that.