Skip to main content

Yo-Yo Ma Performs the First Classical Piece He Ever Learned: Take a 12-Minute Mental Health Break and Watch His Moving “Tiny Desk” Concert

For those who feel their enjoyment of J.S. Bach’s gorgeous Prelude from Cello Suite No. 1 in G major has been undercut rather than enhanced by its frequent TV and film appearances, Yo-Yo Ma’s 2018 NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert is a tonic.

As he explains above, the prelude was the first piece he learned as a beginning four-year-old cellist, adding one measure per day, an incremental approach he recommends.

He and the 300-some-year-old composition have done well by each other throughout a relationship spanning nearly six decades.

His first recording of the Suites, in 1983, resulted in his first Grammy.

Currently, he’s wrapping up the Bach Project, playing the Suites in 36 iconic locations around the world, believing that Bach has a unique ability to unite humans and inspire collaboration, especially in “a time when our civic conversation is so often focused on division.”

The legendary cellist’s unassuming, friendly demeanor is also a unifier, well suited to the informality of the Tiny Desk Concerts.

(Producer Tom Huizenga—a non-cellist—recounts how Ma passed him his bow, along with a 1712 Stradivarius, encouraging him to “play something.”)

Music is a clearly a major part of Ma’s DNA, and also the way in which he experiences the circle of life. He introduces the Sarabande as the heart of the suite, telling how he played it at two friends’ weddings and then again at their memorial services, illustrating the ways in which music is a cumulative emotional proposition.

As he told NPR's Mary Louise Kelly immediately following his performance:

You try and transcend technique to get to what you think is there. Instead of saying, "Here are these notes and this is difficult and I'm going to try and nail it," you try to express it.

With the sand quickly slipping through the hourglass of his 12-minute performance, he treats his audience to Bach’s tiny, populist Gigue.

Set List:

J.S. Bach: "Prelude (from Suite No. 1 for Solo Cello)"

J.S. Bach: "Sarabande (from Suite No. 6 for Solo Cello)"

J.S. Bach: "Gigue (from Suite No. 3 for Solo Cello)"

Related Content:

Leonard Bernstein Introduces 7-Year-Old Yo-Yo Ma: Watch the Youngster Perform for John F. Kennedy (1962)

Watch 450 NPR Tiny Desk Concerts: Intimate Performances from The Pixies, Adele, Wilco, Yo-Yo Ma & Many More

Yo-Yo Ma & The Goat Rodeo Sessions

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Monday, November 4 when her monthly book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domain celebrates Louise Jordan Miln’s “Wooings and Weddings in Many Climes (1900). Follow her @AyunHalliday.

Yo-Yo Ma Performs the First Classical Piece He Ever Learned: Take a 12-Minute Mental Health Break and Watch His Moving “Tiny Desk” Concert is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/2phewK5
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Albert Einstein & Charlie Chaplin Met and Became Fast Famous Friends (1930)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother,” goes a well-known quote attributed variously to Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, and Ernest Rutherford. No matter who said it, “the sentiment… rings true,” writes Michelle Lavery , “for researchers in all disciplines from particle physics to ecopsychology.” As Feynman discovered during his many years of teaching , it could be “the motto of all professional communicators,” The Guardian ’s Russell Grossman writes , “and especially those who earn a living communicating the tricky business of science.” Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he’d had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence f...
Post a Comment
Read more

Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

Image by via Wikimedia Commons Back in college, I spotted A People’s History of the United States   in the bags and on the bookshelves of many a fellow undergraduate. By that time, Howard Zinn’s alternative telling of the American story had been popular reading material for a couple of decades, just as it presumably remains a couple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zinn’s death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. history through non-standard points of view remain widely influential. Just last month, Radical Reads featured the reading list he originally drew up for the  Socialist Worker , pitched at “activists interested in making their own history.” Zinn’s recommendations naturally include the work of other historians, from Gary Nash’s Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (“a pioneering work of ‘multiculturalism’ dealing with racial interactions in the colonial period”) to Vincent Harding’s There Is a River: The Black Struggle for ...
Post a Comment
Read more

1,100 Delicate Drawings of Root Systems Reveals the Hidden World of Plants

We know that plants can inspire art. If you, personally, still require convincing on that point, just have a look at Elizabeth Twining’s Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants , the drawings of Ernst Heinrich Haeckel , Elizabeth Blackwell’s  A Curious Herbal , and Nancy Anne Kingsbury Wollstonecraft’s Specimens of the Plants and Fruits of the Island of Cuba — not to mention the paintings of Georgia O’ Keeffe — all previously featured here on Open Culture. But those works concern themselves only with plant life as it exists above ground. What goes on down below, underneath the soil? That you can see for yourself — and without having to pull up one of our fine flowering (or non-flowering) friends to do so — at Wageningen University’s online archive of root system drawings . “The outcome of 40 years of  root system excavations in Europe,” says that site, the collection contains 1,180 diagrams of species from  Abies alba (best known today as a kind of Christmas t...
Post a Comment
Read more