When people ask me how they should approach performance, I always tell them the professional musician should aspire to the state of the beginner.
You go through phases. You have to reinvent reasons for playing, and one year’s answer might not do for another.
I think of a piece of music as something that comes alive when it is being performed, and I feel that my role in the transmission of music is to be its best advocate at that moment.
One of the most interesting aspects of the film project was collaborating with so many people – directors, filmmakers, and writers – over a five-year period. I learned that there are two components to this.
The tradition of classical music and the opera is such that it used to be the place where social intercourse could take place between all parts of society: politicians, industrialists, artists, citizens, etc. That tradition, I think, still exists, but it’s much, much more diluted.
Practicing is not only playing your instrument, either by yourself or rehearsing with others – it also includes imagining yourself practicing. Your brain forms the same neural connections and muscle memory whether you are imagining the task or actually doing it.
Nobody else can make the sound you make.
When your heart and your mind are engaged, you cannot go wrong.
I’ve been traveling all over the world for 25 years, performing, talking to people, studying their cultures and musical instruments, and I always come away with more questions in my head than can be answered.
As a child, you respond physically, tactically. You’re delighted by sound, you’re delighted by recognizing something. It’s like hide and seek. Is it there? Is it not there? Is it this note? Is it not this note? It’s one fantastic game.
After reaching 50, I began to wonder what the root of life is.
One of the things I love about music is live performance.
Many of the Central Asians know Russian, and Ted Levin speaks it fluently. I speak Chinese, but Mongolian is completely different, so we had to have translators.
We may be coming to a new golden age of instrument making.
Music is one of the ways we can achieve a kind of shorthand to understand each other.
When you learn something from people, or from a culture, you accept it as a gift, and it is your lifelong commitment to preserve it and build on it.
You must have a reason to be in the places to which you go, and you must do only things that you really care about.
There are limits to how much sound a cello can make. That’s part of the framing of acoustical instruments. Finding what those limits might be, and then trying to suggest perhaps even the illusion of going beyond is part of that kind of effort.
This middle age thing is a little weird. Some friends and mentors are gone, and there’s a very forward-looking new generation coming up behind me. So it’s very much finding my own place.
Music enhances the education of our children by helping them to make connections and broadening the depth with which they think and feel. If we are to hope for a society of culturally literate people, music must be a vital part of our children’s education.
Sound is ephemeral, fleeting, but some sort of a physical manifestation can help you hold on to it longer in time. I’m sure of this; I’ve always thought the sound that you make is just the tip of the iceberg, like the person that you see physically is just the tip of the iceberg as well.