People who know Yo-Yo Ma talk about his warmth, his openness, and his disarming humility. When he introduced himself for a recent interview, he said with a wink, “My name is Yo-Yo Ma; I'm an aging cellist.”
Never mind he’s probably the world’s best known cellist, famous since he was 7, when he played for President John F. Kennedy in 1962.
So when Yo-Yo Ma, now 70, takes on a project, people listen.
In 2000, he founded the Silk Road ensemble, a global musical collaboration meant to highlight the universality of music.
His latest project, called We The People, was based at Tanglewood, the sprawling classical music venue in the Berkshire mountains of western Massachusetts.
"We are at inflection point"
Ma curated a week of concerts, public conversations, and community events, billed as his window into “the American experiment.”
“Obviously, we're going through the 250th celebration,” he said, “but also at a time when I think, in many ways, we the people, we the species, are at an inflection point. Where are we going?”
Ma has long supported diverse, immigrant voices and points out that America’s founding fathers were greatly influenced by the enlightenment.
“There was kind of a coherent view of the world,” he said. “That was philosophy joined (with) the arts and sciences.”
Throughout the Tanglewood residency, Ma weaved his own performances with the Boston Symphony Orchestra together with high school marching bands and Native American educators and storytellers.
He booked a Latino block party in the theater pavilion, with feather-costumed dancers and marchers carrying flags from various countries. A community square dance on the lawn featured a live-caller and several generations of New England fiddlers.
One evening, Ma came out onto the stage in a magician’s top hat and rainbow socks to introduce a student performance of Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony – played without a conductor.
“Their experiment is to agree on how to play and feel together without a single leader. Now that’s magic,” he told the delighted audience. “To me, this is an example of musical democracy. A successful version of our American experiment.”
"You can't be cynical with your grandchildren"
Over the years, Ma has made a point of extending classical music well beyond the traditional elite venues. He’s appeared on Sesame Street and the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Early in the pandemic, he serenaded people in a vaccine waiting room in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
When putting together the program for “We The People,” Ma said he looked for collaborators with a hopeful message, through the lens of a grandfather.
“You can't be cynical with your grandchildren. You can't be depressed with your grandchildren. You have to have hope,” he said. “My youngest granddaughter is two years old, which means she's going to be 76 years old in the year 2100. And so, who can actually help us think about a world that she would want to live in?”
His picks included folk singer James Taylor, political historian Heather Cox Richardson, and Alabama civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson, who heads the Equal Justice Initiative.
Stevenson founded several national memorials to the legacy of slavery, including one that remembers the victims of racial lynchings. Stevenson, who plays piano, met Ma last year at a museum event where they joined others in a rendition of "We Shall Overcome."
“I think music has always been an important part of the struggle to create a more just America,” Stevenson said. “During enslavement, without the spirituals, many of the 10 million black people who were enslaved in this country would not have been able to cope with the constant terror, violence and assault.”
But over the past century of injustices, Stevenson says many musicians, especially in classical music, have looked the other way.
“Yo-Yo Ma stands, I think, on the opposite side of that tradition. He is a musician that refuses to be silent in the face of the kind of horrors we've seen throughout history,” Stevenson said. “And I think that's an important model for other musicians and for other artists and people who love music and art.”
Composer Allison Loggins-Hull said she’s grateful classical music institutions like Tanglewood are starting to take that kind of risk. Her own piece, a rhapsody for flute dedicated to Joni Mitchell, was performed at Ma’s residency.
“I can say that there has been a significant change," she said. "Much more willingness to have these types of discussions that maybe aren't directly about music or the tradition, but more about the responsibility of just being a citizen."
"Why shouldn't we be one community?"
Ma insists that “We The People” is not political and neither is he. Diversity, he said, speaks for itself.
“Creativity happens around the edges of ecosystems, of disciplines, of peoples,” he said. “I don't have a political agenda. I'm actually for the good of people. And instead of protesting, I just like to join things together. And why shouldn't we be one community?
The next day, he put on sneakers and a polo shirt to play cello on the street as part of a local busking festival.
Audio to come. Credit to NEPM’s Erin O’Neil for sound of Yo-Yo Ma busking.
