The Chinese American cellist, who’s in Hong Kong for a one-night-only concert, looks back at his illustrious music career and shares why he thinks ‘music is a service’
Chinese American cellist Yo-Yo Ma is in Hong Kong this week for a concert celebrating the 60th anniversary of The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He will perform with the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra tomorrow, November 8 at the Concert Hall, Hong Kong Cultural Centre.
On November 7, he attended a discussion titled A Dialogue on Music and Future Leadership at The Chinese University of Hong Kong—an event for the students co-organised by the university and AIA.
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The 68-year-old musician, who was conferred an honorary doctorate from the university in 1993, began the talk by demystifying the glory of being named protégé when his talent for playing the cello was discovered at the age of four. He also talked about his identity crisis as a Chinese born in Paris who moved to the US when he was seven. “The French said France is the greatest country in the world. My parents said, ‘China is the greatest culture in the world’. Americans said, ‘America is the greatest culture’. I grew up with contradictory social messages,” he says.
Studying anthropology at Harvard helped him “resolve these questions without doing the thing that everybody was asking [me to do]: choose. I decided I prefer to live aboard complicated and intercultural. To be able to understand, in a broad stroke, a certain series of cultures on the continent is an incredible gift.”
Music offered him a similar journey of reflection. “As a performer, you’re always experimenting, trying to figure out who you are, what your body mechanism is, and how am I going to bring content to somebody else?”