Yo-Yo Ma wanted a double bass at three and settled for a cello
At three, Yo-Yo Ma asked his father for a big instrument. A leading Paris violin maker lent the family a tiny sixteenth-size cello, and by seven the boy was playing for Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. He went on to record more than 90 albums and win 20 Grammy Awards.
Ma was born in Paris on October 7, 1955, to Chinese parents who had moved from China to France. His mother, Marina Lu, was a singer; his father, Hiao-Tsiun Ma, was a violinist, composer and music professor. Before settling on the cello at four, Ma had tried drums, violin and piano, and he jokes that the double bass was his real first choice because of its size. His father taught him at first, then admitted a better teacher was needed. His sister Yeou-Cheng played violin and piano professionally before becoming a paediatrician.
The family moved to Boston when he was seven. Leonard Bernstein introduced the brother-and-sister duo on a US broadcast when Yo-Yo was eight, and in 1964 Isaac Stern presented the pair on The Tonight Show. In New York he studied with Leonard Rose at Juilliard and finished school at 15. He dropped out of Columbia, played under his childhood hero Pablo Casals at the Marlboro Festival, where in 1972 he met his future wife Jill Hornor, and took an anthropology degree from Harvard in 1976.
Ma's range extends well beyond the classical canon. He has recorded bluegrass, traditional Chinese melodies, Brazilian music and the tangos of Astor Piazzolla, and worked with performers as different as Bobby McFerrin, Carlos Santana and Sting. Film audiences have heard him on John Williams's scores for Seven Years in Tibet and Memoirs of a Geisha, on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and in recordings of Ennio Morricone's film music. The pianist Emanuel Ax, a friend since Juilliard, is a frequent chamber partner.
His main instrument is the Davidov Stradivarius, made by Antonio Stradivari in 1712. Since 2006 the United Nations has counted him among its Messengers of Peace, and his honours include the Avery Fisher Prize in 1978, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and Kennedy Center Honors in 2011, and the Polar Music Prize in 2012. Time named him among its 100 most influential people of 2020.
Source: Yo-Yo Ma
