Yo-Yo Ma sits in the middle of the stage, one leg draped over the other, as he listens to a question from someone in the audience. “Ask me anything” appears on a large screen above him.
One of the questions comes from a young man, a cello player who wants to know how to overcome the doubts that every musician encounters at various stages in their development.
Ma smiles. “How much time do you have?”
The audience laughs. A technician enters the stage and hands Yo-Yo Ma one of his cellos. He doesn’t want to start playing before giving an answer. “I try to find meaning and purpose every time I practice,” he says. “I treat each note with respect, the way I would treat a dear friend.”
That’s how Ma opened his “Reflections in Words And Music” performance at Hancher Auditorium in Iowa City on Oct. 30. The evening included details of his personal life paired with well-known pieces from his repertoire, as well as reflections on how music has shaped Ma’s thinking about art and human nature.
“Reflections” is a continuation of Our Common Nature, a series of podcasts that Ma recorded along with Ana González, where both traveled around the United States to make music and meet people who have deep connections to the earth.
“Culture makes us human,” Ma said. “Culture helps us care for one another and for the world we share. It reminds us that nature is part of our humanity, it is how we create trust.”
The first piece he played was the “Mi’kmaq Honor Song” composed by George Paul, an elder from the Mi’kmaq Nation in Eastern Canada. In interviews, Paul has explained that “Honor Song” had its origins in a vision he had in which a voice told him to travel west to seek knowledge, and that he had a song to sing. On that trip, Paul saw children dancing at a pow wow and cried.
“Our people were losing our culture,” he told the CBC.
In Ma’s rendering, the low and mournful sounds from his 1712 Davidov Stradivarius cello filled the auditorium, they relayed the lament that Paul had felt on that trip. Later, there was also gratitude and hope in the composition. (You can hear Ma perform the piece to the Swiss Alps as a lament for melting glaciers on YouTube.)
While showing photographs on the screen, Ma talked about his childhood in Paris in the 1950s and how his father, also a cellist, wanted him “to be totally obedient.” He soon realized that to be a musician he had develop his own point of view. One of his teachers, Leon Kirchner, once said to him, “Your playing is just fine, but what is your sound?”
Ma embarked on a journey to study the different harmonies in the world and develop his own artistic taste. Interwoven with his personal narrative, which included studying anthropology at Harvard and having a family, he played excerpts from Shostakovich’s first cello concerto, Piazzolla’s Libertango and Concert for quintet, Billy Strayhorn’s “Take the ‘A’ Train,” Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for The Common Man” and Dvorak’s “Going Home” theme from his 9th Symphony “From the New World,” among many others.
After delighting the audience with excerpts from the Bach Cello Suites 1 and 5, which under his execution have become legendary, Ma finished the concert by asking the audience to read Maya Angelous’s poem “A Brave and Startling Truth.” The audience showed its appreciation with a round of applause after the last stanza:
When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.
