The quintessential Yo-Yo Ma tour stop includes an event, or several events, designed to bring together members of a local community who might not otherwise cross paths, even if they have a shared interest. There is usually some music, but mostly people share stories and ideas. These used to be juggled alongside his performances; now, they are managed by Sound Postings, whose five-member team is made up of non-musicians.
“I love that,” Ma said, “because most of the audiences I play for are not musicians.”
“FOR ANY INSTRUMENTALIST, once past 70 is a crapshoot,” Carter Brey told Playbill this year as he was preparing to retire from his post as the New York Philharmonic’s principal cellist. Ma’s daughter gives him a hard time whenever he plays out of tune, and he made adjustments in bowing and tempo to the Dvorak concerto in Denver. But he also said that these days, he is “more efficient and more musical.”
But why, at an age when musicians wind down their careers, is he expanding his reach? Despite maintaining a full performance calendar, Ma has a running joke is that he is retired, and that “when you’re retired, you only do what you want to do.” The truth is that his brain may not be wired for a life at rest. “I hope,” he said, “that I will stay curious until I die.”
Richardson, the historian who recently appeared at Tanglewood as part of Ma’s festival “We the People,” theorized that he “would play if there was no one to listen, and he would play for nobody but third-graders if that was who was there.” Ax described their collaboration as a kind of endless search, saying, “We’ve played the Beethoven sonatas for almost 50 years, and we’re still finding ways to do them differently each time.”
Ma is putting much more than music out into the world, though, including an example to learn from. “He is trying to reclaim American democracy and move it forward in a much healthier, more holistic way,” Richardson said. But she also acknowledged that it’s an enormous responsibility; a public figure herself, she knows that someone in his position can never lash out or punch down. He must, as even he put it, “choose the better angels of our nature.”
He has his critics, and there are ways in which his extra-musical work can seem like a Pollyannaish vestige of multiculturalism’s golden age. His community programming sometimes raises the hackles of locals, who most often change their minds once they meet him. And there are limits to what he can do. He’s only one person, and he can’t give his full attention to every person and place. (Shackleton said that Sound Postings spends a lot of time trying to ensure that his visits have lasting effects.)
