Yo-Yo Ma — Music Happens Between the Notes

The great cellist shares his philosophy of living. Turning fear into joy. Performance as hospitality and communal witnessing. Beauty as a transfer of life. Sound as visual. How music makes us better. And being a firm believer in accidental meetings.

Yo-Yo Ma is a citizen artist and a forensic musicologist, decoding the work of musical creators across time and space. In his art, Yo-Yo Ma resists fixed boundaries, and would like to rename classical music just “music” — born in improvisation, and traversing territory as vast and fluid as the world we inhabit. In this generous and intimate conversation, he shares his philosophy of curiosity about life, and of performance as hospitality.

Yo-Yo Ma has won 18 Grammy Awards and is the recipient of the National Medal of Arts, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the inaugural Fred Rogers Legacy Award. His newest album is “Brahms: The Piano Trios,” released with Emanuel Ax and Leonidas Kavakos. His most recent release with the Silk Road Ensemble is featured on the soundtrack to Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s documentary “The Vietnam War.”