I think anybody who goes away finds you appreciate home more when you return.
Once something is memorable, it’s living and you’re using it. That to me is the foundation of a creative society.
With every year of playing, you want to relax one more muscle. Why? Because the more tense you are, the less you can hear.
People will ask, ‘Are you famous?’ And I always answer, ‘My mother thinks so.’
I realized late in life that my twin passions are music and people.
As a musician I’m kind of nomadic, Waldo-like. I show up in different places, and I’m witness to unbelievable things.
One is that you have to take time, lots of time, to let an idea grow from within. The second is that when you sign on to something, there will be issues of trust, deep trust, the way the members of a string quartet have to trust one another.
My involvement in the political arena is to make sure there’s a place for culture.
Music has always been transnational;.
Classical music is one of the best things that ever happened to mankind. If you get introduced to it in the right way, it becomes your friend for life.
I remember when I was growing up. My great wish was to understand who I was and how I fit in the world.
The thing that I’ve always been slightly frustrated with, was that the idea of a CD is kind of confined to a material possession that you can put on a shelf. And the idea of music, for me, is always about both the communication and the sharing of content. And so the interactive part is missing.
I play an instrument that has four strings, and I’m still trying to get it right. What I’ve tried to do in the process of playing these four strings is to try and understand the people I meet, the stories they have to tell. And then become an advocate for them and their stories through music.
I think that peace is, in many ways, a precondition of joy.
A Senegalese poet said ‘In the end we will conserve only what we love. We love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.’ We must learn about other cultures in order to understand, in order to love, and in order to preserve our common world heritage.
There’s a part of me that’s always charging ahead. I’m the curious kid, always going to the edge.
One of the marks of a great teacher lies not only in an ability to impart knowledge but also in knowing when to encourage a student to go off on his own.
I think the purpose of a piece of music is significant when it actually lives in somebody else. A composer puts down a code, and a performer can activate the code in somebody else. Once it lives in somebody else, it can live in others as well.
It’s easy for me to care about Toronto, because Toronto is a community that cares about itself. It represents the world. It talks to itself, and because it does, it figures out that there must be a music garden as part of its existence.
Music has always been transnational; people pick up whatever interests them, and certainly a lot of classical music has absorbed influences from all over the world.