Music’s first responder: How Yo-Yo Ma answered the pandemic’s call and consoled a reeling nation
After a lifetime of preparation, the iconic cellist is once more proving classical music’s power to honor grief, catalyze hope, and connect us across isolation.
In a way, while the pandemic’s disruptions have left many feeling plunged into completely unknown terrain, Ma had been preparing for this moment his entire life. “Art is not for art’s sake,” he says. “Well, it could be. But really, it’s for life’s sake.”
“I want to try this on you and ask what you think,” he says. He goes on to speak about the ethical vision in Beethoven’s music, a sense of “reaching out for something that was almost attainable,” the possibility for a more fair and just society that, in Beethoven’s day, still glittered beckoningly on the horizon. Two world wars, he continues, shattered that vision and showed us “that the veneer of civilization was really just a veneer.” These days, he says, the ethical striving and idealism still present in Beethoven’s music all too rarely find an echo in our contemporary world.
“But,” ever the optimist, Ma continues, “with the new tools and understanding we have, could there be a more hopeful humanistic philosophy, or a way of thinking that can unite us and propel us forward, maybe not to the same utopian ideal but at least toward being in balance between ourselves and our planet?”
This is not how most musicians typically begin an interview. Ma’s mind is a vast storehouse of ideas, associations, curiosities, streams of thought. “When you ask Yo-Yo a question, his brain comes up simultaneously with 100 different ways of answering,” says Sara Wolfensohn, an old friend.
“I need to be fed ideas,” Ma tells me, though he’s also got a lot of his own. He thinks knowledge is overly siloed in today’s world. He wants to put science back in conversation with the arts. He loves the concept in ecology of the “edge effect,” the notion that biodiversity is richest at the borderline between two ecosystems, and he frequently employs it as a metaphor. He also wants culture to play a more central role in society as a gateway to things our country appears to be decidedly lacking at the moment: trust, empathy, and humility. He views all three as critical to the world’s thriving into the future. And these days, he explains, he is often thinking generationally, both about the limits of his own and the birth of the next.
“I’m about to become a grandfather for the third time,” Ma says, his face widening into that smile that routinely warms the chilliest of concert halls. “And I know that while I’m not going to see the year 2100,” he continues, “someone very close to me probably will. But what is that world going to be like? What is my part in handing them whatever I’ve been responsible for, and what are they going to think about it? These are not abstract questions to me anymore. They’re real questions. Pre-pandemic, the big frustration was that we were spending the great majority of our time producing things,” he adds. “Now I think so much more about meaning and purpose.”
It’s also safe to say that Ma — before the pandemic, too — had thought about these topics once or twice. At-home viewers of the videos he has been creating from his living room can sometimes spot, behind Ma’s right shoulder, a picture of his hero, the legendary Catalan cellist Pablo Casals. The image is framed next to a quote from Casals that Ma has always prized: “I am a man first, an artist second. As a man, my first obligation is to the welfare of my fellow men. I will endeavor to meet this obligation through music — the means which God has given me — since it transcends language, politics and national boundaries. My contribution to world peace may be small, but at least I will have given all I can to an ideal I hold sacred.”
From the perspective of the classical music world today, Casals’s sentiment may sound decidedly old-fashioned. In their own era, men like Casals and Leonard Bernstein had political and social visions, and they spoke beyond classical audiences to address a wider public (John F. Kennedy once said that Bernstein was the only man he “would never run against for political office”). But as the field’s share of prestige in the culture at large has shrunk, so too has the ethical purview of its leading voices. These days, the field’s stars tend to traffic within a more circumscribed cultural sphere, even as they try, when possible, to expand the music’s reach.
Artistic paths rarely follow a straight line. In Ma’s case, one can’t say exactly what led to what, nor is he in a rush to tell you. But in the years following his trip to the Kalahari Desert, Ma began authoring new scripts for building a life of meaning in music. Genre demarcations, which had long been the guardrails of his path through music, suddenly seemed less relevant. While he continued his concerto appearances and solo work, Ma was also suddenly playing the tangos of Astor Piazzolla, and then recording a bluegrass-inflected album, Appalachia Waltz, with the fiddle player Mark O’Connor and bassist Edgar Meyer. Music-making was, in short, becoming less of “a formal thing.” And perhaps the San notion of an instrument being little more than a means to an end had also seeped in somewhere. Around this time, Ma absentmindedly left his $2.5 million Montagnana cello in the trunk of a New York City taxi. (It was recovered.)
Even as he ventured musically further afield, the Bach suites remained Ma’s magnetic north. But he no longer felt compelled to plumb their mystery as part of a solitary quest, choosing instead, in the late 1990s, to work with six directors to create a series of six films, each inspired by one of the suites. Then in 2000, Ma founded Silkroad, a global collective of musicians inspired by the cross-cultural connections that flourished in the lands along the ancient Silk Road trading route. The attacks of September 11, 2001, and the waves of xenophobia that followed, seemed only to reinforce the need for listening across cultures. Headquartered in Boston, Silkroad is still thriving some two decades later.
Three decades later, Ma is now well practiced at seeking out what’s needed. Over the course of the last year, in addition to the recorded videos, the live-streamed performances, and the tour on the flatbed truck, he has released a new album, Songs of Comfort and Hope, with pianist Kathryn Stott, and he has brought his ideas on music and healing directly to the source by performing over Zoom in hospitals. Among the communities Ma has played for privately several times are front-line health care workers at Massachusetts General Hospital.
“It was a time of tremendous anxiety and unbelievable stress,” says Dr. Kathy May Tran, a hospitalist at Mass. General who coordinated his first performance in May for roughly 200 health care workers. “But the chance to connect over music, together with Yo-Yo’s words of care and support, and just the priority of gratitude that he embodies, were restorative to our entire community and gave us the strength to continue. That sounds corny, but it’s completely true.”
Since the pandemic began, Ma has also become involved with a national nonprofit called Project: Music Heals Us, which arranges virtual private concerts for hospital patients. The group to date has connected 161 musicians from across the country with over 3,100 patients in 23 hospitals, many of whom are severely isolated from family and even from most hospital staff due to COVID protocols. The contributing musicians come from all corners of the profession, though it’s fair to say not many are internationally renowned soloists. At one point, project organizers say, a patient at Houston Methodist hospital told his physical therapist that later in the day he would be receiving a private performance from Yo-Yo Ma. The clinician responded by noting that the patient was apparently suffering from delusions, only to later enter the ICU and find that Yo-Yo Ma was indeed there on an iPad, giving a private performance of the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts.”
“Musicians like Yo-Yo and many others could have taken the path of least resistance and easily avoided the pandemic altogether,” Dr. Tran says. “Instead, they chose to walk into it head on. In medicine and science, there is the concept of a catalyst, an entity or substance that creates a chemical reaction that can be lasting, permanent, transformative. During this pandemic, Yo-Yo has been a catalyst.”
Back in our Zoom interview, the hour has grown late and Ma has grown introspective. “We’re a country that was invented by a group of very smart people,” he says. “We’re living the American experiment, and we want the experiment to succeed and thrive. We want homo sapiens to thrive and survive. I ask myself, What does a 65-year-old do next? I want to be useful, I want to respond to need. I want to try, in whatever years I have, to do things with as much meaning and impact as possible.”
The questioning might imply that an answer would involve a departure from his recent roles, and it’s true that Ma has rarely stayed in one place, artistic or geographic, for long. But it also depends on one’s vantage point. Pull back the camera on his journey and one begins to see not wanderings but through-lines, as even Ma seems to concede. “My interests have always started with people,” he says. “Who they are, why they think and do what they do.”
That observation surely applies to Ma’s music as well. The most powerful performers have an almost mystical way of blurring the lines between interpreting and creating. They attempt to inhabit the composer’s way of seeing. To do so, Ma once said, “One must go out of oneself, finding empathy for another’s experience, forming another world.”
The key word here is empathy. It is what bridges Ma’s work as a musician and his social consciousness. Returning to the composer Leon Kirchner’s challenge, one might say empathy is the true center of Ma’s tone. And yes, he’s found it. And built on it his life.
