Yo-Yo Ma Quotes

I think one of the great things about being a musician is that you never stop learning.

To me, the object of practicing is to allow you to play what you hear. But you're always hearing new things, so you never get to the end of it.

Classical music is always a really great way for me to get my chops to where I want them to be.

You see, that is it with music, you never stop learning.

I feel like a lot of the fundamental material, I've assimilated. So now the question is: Am I going to really get into my spiritual inheritance of music and really develop my abilities?

It keeps my feet on the ground just making sure that I'm always trying to learn something new or trying to be a real guitar player.

Every record, you've got more experiences to draw on as a writer and a musician.

Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.

Music is all about wanting to be better at it.

For me, making music is a continuous learning experience, and I think that it feeds itself.

I'm learning on the guitar all the time.

The key to longevity is to learn every aspect of music that you can.

Music is a continual learning process. One finds new insights all the time. For me, it began at a very early age; from the beginning, there was something besides the notes.

Education, for me, has helped me in my music.

In the United States, we spend millions of dollars on sports because it promotes teamwork, discipline, and the experience of learning to make great progress in small increments. Learning to play music does all this and more.

Playing music is a lifetime's work. And if you want to carry on with it, you have to try to better yourself. You have to see where the music can take you.

As far as practicing is concerned, I usually try to do one to two hours a day. It isn't good to practice too much, or your playing becomes too mechanical.

Part of being in a band is getting better.

I was a late bloomer, but I realised that people really liked it when I played blues scales and, with the piano, I had that insatiable need to prove myself.

Pushing yourself and digging into something new, that's what being a musician is all about.

A conundrum of music is that music brings people together, yet to become a skilled musician involves a certain amount of lonely time in which you're just figuring it out, practicing.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice. How do you get away from it? Improvise.

Always continue to perform no matter what or where the activity is: local theater, regional theater, local clubs or coffee shops. Continue to play the guitar or your instrument and always continue to progress or otherwise you will fail.

Improvising is writing, too - there was no music and now there's music. So that's composition. And any time you take any sort of a performance liberty, you're making a compositional choice. I don't know a serious performer who hasn't made compositional decisions, who hasn't engaged in the art of composition.

It's no good to do a piece once and then move on because it doesn't have time to develop. I try to play seven or eight concerti in a season, and generally one or two of those are new for me.