Helen Wallace
Programme director, writer
‘Yo-yo Ma is not alone in loving bluegrass. In my life as a concert programmer, I’m constantly astounded by the virtuosity of folk musicians, so it was great to share that enthusiasm with the master cellist.’
‘Isn’t it horrible?’ Yo-yo Ma says cheerfully from his home in Massachusetts. He’s been in lockdown for two months – two months in which he would have been completing a six-continent tour of Bach’s cello suites. Not one to let the grass grow, he saw the rupture as an opportunity, and launched #Songsofcomfort from his living room with a melody by Dvo ák. Typically, the point was not to showcase his own talents, but to invite others to contribute.
And they did: as of late May there are more than 13,000 #Songsofcomfort posts, tens of millions of views. From American healthcare workers to students in China and children in Lebanon, from Paul Simon to Carole King, from musicians Ma has encountered through his work with the Silk Road Ensemble to a generation of young cellists, they’ve all joined in. It’s quite a harvest, and neatly encapsulates what Ma sees as his fundamental mission: ‘This moment has clarified for me that music was invented for a purpose: to serve, to respond to the needs of individuals, communities and society. It is a source of comfort, connection and hope.’
Ever restless, his mind is now turning to the challenge of live performance in a paranoid new world. ‘People are talking about drive-in concerts. I like that idea: it’s safe, it’s fun, there’s a big screen, you can honk and flash your lights, you can make out in the back of the car! There are stadia and big open spaces that would lend
themselves to that.’ I mention the drive-in La bohème planned by English National Opera at Alexandra Palace, and he hoots. Thinking big comes easily to America’s most loved classical musician. Last year he performed the Bach suites outdoors in Chicago to more than 11,000 people. As we speak, he is about to do so again as a fundraising live broadcast, a memorial to all those who have died in the pandemic.
Long ago, Ma became the nation’s chief mourner and secular cantor, the musician who honoured the victims of 9/11, who has performed for eight presidents (notably, not for the present incumbent). In that, he is the latest in a line of iconic cellists who, over the last century, have come to embody moral authority. Pablo Casals, in the time of the Spanish Civil War and World War II, resisted fascism by removing himself from public view, refusing to perform in collaborating countries, focusing his efforts on mentoring in his Prades hideaway – his self-denial was a form of musical hunger strike. And then ‘Slava’ Rostropovich was the cellist of the Cold War and its aftermath, a man of explosive action: he not only sheltered Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn but wrote an open letter to Pravda attacking cultural oppression; he played as the Berlin Wall fell; he rushed to support Boris Yeltsin in the 1991 coup.
In some ways, Ma’s ambition is more politically radical than either of his predecessors. Truly a musician for a globalised 21st century, he has roundly rejected the concept of Western cultural hegemony. In the 1990s he set out on a journey back to his roots along the Silk Road, embracing musical traditions from the Arab world to Africa, from central
Asia to China and India. ‘People get hung up on genres like people get hung up on nationalities; for me, that’s the least important thing about a person!’
He genuinely wanted to hear and to learn from other master musicians. And his recognition and promotion of other cultures and communities was prescient – this was a diversity initiative long before the West woke up to the shocking absence of non-white, First World cultural voices. ‘Silkroad was one of these moments in which I followed my curiosity, sought answers to questions that had been with me since I was very young,’ he says. ‘My family’s experiences of immigration – my parents emigrating from China to France, and our journey from Paris to New York – taught me that our shared humanity is a much stronger force than boundaries of culture or nation or discipline. I’m more human for having been part of Silkroad.’
Ma may be challenging the dominance of a certain type of Western culture but, self-effacing to a fault, he says his thirst for connection sprang from a deeply personal source. ‘When I was 19, my cello teacher [Leonard Rose] said to me “Yo-yo, you haven’t found your voice”. I said OK, kept looking for my voice and ultimately decided it was to hear the needs of others and to represent them. I will be their voice; that’s how I would define my job.’
As Aiofe O’donovan, who sings on Ma’s new bluegrass recording project, Not Our First Goat Rodeo, puts it: ‘He’s effortless at connecting with people, collaboration is at his core. He has so much respect for other people, other musicians, and he’s an example of a great learner.’
You can imagine executives at the cellist’s record company needed some persuading back in the 1990s when he flew down to Nashville to make his first bluegrass recording. And when he could sell thousands of units of an Elgar Cello Concerto, why would you confuse fans with a session with Carlos Santana or Bobby Mcferrin or a disc featuring central Asian instruments with unpronounceable names? It might have looked a gimmick, but it was actually all part of a creative unlocking: to break down barriers between genres, and between composers and performers and bring them into one space.
It was a vision more closely aligned with the future direction of music than many recognised at the time. Rather than ‘slumming it’ with figures from the bluegrass or central Asian worlds, he knew these collisions would enrich the musical soil. It reminds me of conductor Serge Koussevitsky’s comment about Leonard Bernstein, asking when he would stop ‘trashing about on Broadway’ and
write something decent. That ‘trashing about’ was ultimately Bernstein’s most important work. If you are going to become a humanitarian icon, you have to meet people where they are, speak their musical language, and for Ma that means all people, be they in Senegal or Lima, Okinawa or Beirut. His curiosity has taken him further and deeper into the music of other cultures than his predecessors.
Not that he has turned his back on classical music or compromised his performances – he recognises where his own gifts lie. It’s about the exchange. His interrupted 36-city Bach project involved ‘days of action’ in each city, in which he would meet members of grass roots music projects, discuss their issues and play with them. ‘I’ve got an incredible team who seek out people in these places who are using music to strengthen their communities. We want to connect them with decisionmakers, give them resources, share best practice. It’s an experiment, but we’re not giving up.’
Two moments of the last tour stand out: ‘In Dakar, Senegal, I had an unforgettable encounter with a kora player who was the most extraordinarily tactile, intuitive, connecting musician. In Australia, I played a duo with an Aboriginal musician and we suddenly did something together. Oh my goodness, it was like we had a 20-year relationship; something between the sacred and secular happened. That’s the only way I can describe it. I treasure the relationships I’ve formed with people I’ve met along the way. They are guides of
‘I treasure the relationships I’ve formed with people that I’ve met along the way’
A joyful musical partnership
Kathryn Stott on 35 years in tandem ‘Yo-yo and I gave our first concert in 1985,’ says pianist Kathryn Stott, ‘and since then we’ve played nearly every season together, giving anything up to three tours per season – the only exceptions have been the one or two occasions when he’s had something like The Bach Project going on.
‘What makes playing with Yo-yo such a pleasure is the total trust we have in each other. When you’ve been musical partners with someone for so long, you know exactly how far you can push each other without ever compromising the other person. I also know how he really likes to have a dialogue on stage – the idea of me being just an “accompanist” simply doesn’t come into it. It’s all about teamwork, and because we’re very finely tuned to each other, we’ll know if one of us is feeling particularly charged up going into a concert. When that happens, that person leads the way – it could be either one of us on any given night.
‘We have a lot of fun on stage and can make each other giggle, though when we’ve established a more serious and profound mood, I’ve also sometimes found myself really moved during our own concerts. One of the things I’ve loved most about our partnership, though, is that we’re both real adventurers. When we first played tangos and Brazilian music, for instance, we were willing to go on those adventures together, surrounding ourselves with people who knew these genres inside out and being willing to learn from them. It’s been great to explore outside the classical music world as well as enjoying playing Brahms, Beethoven, Franck and so on.’ many different kinds and they remind me, again and again, of how little I know.’
What’s interesting is how cleverly Ma has used his profile to create a shifting world community of musicians on the Silkroad roster, from huge bankable stars such Bill Frissell, Sarah Jarosz, Gregory Porter, Angelique Kidjo and Toumani Diabaté to those musicians with lower profiles but, vitally, more time and energy to give to creative workshops and collaborations. Though he has a sheaf of commissions to his name – by Tan Dun, Osvaldo Golijov, John Williams and Bright Sheng among others – perhaps his most significant legacy will lie in the future fruits of this global Silkroad network.
Blue, blue grass of home
But time to head from global to local.
Not Our First Goat Rodeo takes Ma back to American roots, and his desire to be immersed in a group. Playing alongside his fellow ‘goats’ – mandolinist Chris Thile, host of PBS Live from Here and singer Aiofe O’donovan (both major bluegrass stars), fiddler Stuart Duncan and bassist Edgar Meyer – Ma is in a nest of dizzying virtuosos. ‘A friend of a friend is a friend,’ he says. ‘It’s all about relationships.’
The goats’ first album together – The Goat Rodeo Sessions – was a chart-topper ten years ago, and it’s taken that long for crazy schedules to align once again. The title is taken from an aviation term for a situation in which 100 things need to go right to avoid disaster. This new collection of intricate, quirky, untamable miniatures was cooked up over many hours by
Meyer, Thile, Duncan and O’donovan
(‘A fabulous musicians and a wonderful person,’ says Ma; ‘plus, she tolerates the rest of us.’). Violinist Duncan explains the origin of the title: ‘There was a lot of back and forth on every single piece. Edgar, Chris and I would sit down and someone would blurt out an idea. Then someone would add to it or subtract from it, or shift
the beat. It would change again and again, until Edgar’s copyist had to change the music so many times his wife commented it was starting to turn into a goat rodeo.’
I ask what Ma’s role in the process was. Thile explains: ‘We’d send him over music for his evaluation and it would come back with interest; he brings such a compositional perspective. For me, being with these musicians is like being a kid in a candy store. Yo-yo injects such life into everything, it spreads through the whole group, it changes us. He bequeaths that nuance of sound, that sensitivity of hearing; it’s enabling. The composing of music is so much more about what you imagine that you can play. There are no restrictions in that group, we just bring out the vibrant life within us.’
The goats might bring different influences, but their musical worlds are more permeable than it might appear. Both Thile and Meyer have classical training, and Meyer is keen to point out they bring all their experiences to the collaboration: ‘We try to create a new kind of space in which we can be ourselves.’ I think of ‘Waltz Whitman’, a track on Not Our First Goat Rodeo where a radiant cello melody over trickling mandolin deepens its colours when transferred to bluegrass fiddle, or the delicate, intimate blend of voices in ‘The Trappings’.
Meyer strikes me as the guiding presence of the group, and was the person who originally introduced Ma to bluegrass music in the late 1980s. ‘I’ll never forget meeting Edgar,’ says Ma; ‘he was brought to play for me when he was quite young, and I was absolutely bowled over.’ They recorded the Appalachia Waltz album with fiddler Mark O’connor, the beginning of a life-long creative friendship. When I ask Meyer if Ma has evolved over the years, he’s thoughtful: ‘His musical essence has remained constant. It was there from the start, it was unique and it was always more than enough.’
Unlike Thile and Meyer, Stuart Duncan is a mountain fiddler through and through: ‘Mountain fiddling has a whole different approach to bowing, and for me to learn about Yo-yo’s way of producing sound was fascinating.’ How much of a stretch was it for Ma? ‘I get the impression that Yo-yo has long ago gotten rid of any worry about risk in music. I usually play completely off the top of my head, so to learn someone else’s melody and triplets and trills, that’s as much of a stretch for me as Yo-yo playing fiddle rhythms!’
As well as the Appalachia projects and Goat Rodeo, in 2017 Meyer, Thile and Ma produced an exquisite recording of Bach Trios, a project that Thile treasures: ‘For all of us, Bach is the greatest musician who ever lived. Period. He gave us an entire vocabulary with which to discuss our hopes and dreams. Balancing the vast expressive capabilities of the cello with the delicacy of the mandolin was a challenge, but worth every note.’
And so we return to Bach, the one constant in Ma’s musical life. He has proposed that it is the ideal balance of objective and subjective that gives
Bach’s music its enduring spiritual and emotional power. His third and latest set of recordings was arguably his most fragile, most free-wheeling, ethereal and, at times, untethered. ‘I think what has changed is, with each new project over the years, I have become increasingly comfortable following the philosophy of my hero Casals, who thought of himself as a human being first, a musician second, and only third, a cellist,’ he reflects. ‘I want to keep learning, and to use whatever tools I have to advocate for the role that culture can play in finding solutions to the challenges that threaten our future. This pandemic is a reminder that we have to come together as one planet to build a better world, and I don’t think we can do it without the cultural values that have too often been forgotten: trust, truth and service.’
Yo-yo Ma’s advice to young musicians is disarming, and anyone who has heard him play knows it is a truth by which he lives: ‘Don’t ever protect yourself against your audience. All that you’ve put in to learning your instrument, all that you put of yourself into your performance – ultimately, the person who is listening is the most important person in the room. Breathe life into that relationship.’
Not Our First Goat Rodeo is out now on Sony Music Masterworks (19439738552)
‘Yo-yo injects such life into everything; it spreads through the whole group’