Instrument of Change

Yo-Yo Ma, the most visible cellist of his generation, sits cocooned inside the ostentatious privacy of a long, white limousine that glides away from the Watergate Hotel in Washington. There is a stack of newspapers on the leather seat next to him, but Ma ignores both the photo of himself in the Washington Post, taken at last night’s White House dinner for Chinese President Jiang Zhemin, and the one on the front page of the Baltimore Sun. He is talking about the Kalahari Desert.

“You see a lot of sky and you don’t see people for days,” he recalls. “It’s very scary.”

That trip to Africa is one of Ma’s conversational touchstones. He had taken a film crew to Namibia, in southwestern Africa, to observe the trance dances and musical rituals of the bushmen, and the desert scene he describes shows him in all his favorite guises: as musical diplomat, as cultural anthropologist, as adventurer, as explorer of visual media, as seeker after the sources of his art.

While the rest of the classical music business is anxiously retrenching amid rumors of its death, the ubiquitous cellist is working hard, even frantically, at redefining what a classical musician is.

This evening and for the next two evenings, Ma will play the Schumann Cello Concerto with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, conducted by David Zinman, and the performance will be one of those quality, leather-and-gold events that high-priced musicians specialize in purveying, the sort of thing that until a few years ago was what Ma mostly did. These days, though, Schumann must be shoehorned into a calendar crowded with video projects, world premieres, collaborations with choreographers, Kabuki actors and landscape designers, explorations in Chinese music and forays into Appalachian fiddle music.

In a few weeks, Ma will start a seven-day mini-tour (which will reach Los Angeles on Friday), teaming up with a complement of Argentine musicians to perform music by the master of the nuevo tango, Astor Piazzolla.

“Everything is crossover,” Ma is fond of saying. “There’s no pure music. There’s no pure culture. It’s important to know that the Bach suites come from dance forms. The sarabande was originally a lascivious Moorish dance--not unlike the tango.”

And yet, as the big car muscles its way through the morning traffic toward Baltimore, Ma picks up his Kalahari tale, about a culture that is as pure as they come. At the end of his stay among them he produced a cello and offered them a valedictory performance of his own. The bushmen, it turned out, were not interested.

“They said, ‘Stop. Don’t play. We want to play for you,’ ” he remembers with a laugh. “It was hubris on my part to bring my cello. They didn’t give a damn.”

In the telling, the Kalahari anecdote also becomes one about ego and the limits of fame, about a star bumping into his own once-familiar anonymity in a distant place, like meeting a neighbor a few thousand miles from home.

Many of those who know the cellist will swear that he is all humility, but Ma knows better.

“To be a good performer you have to have a very strong ego,” he admits. “But to be a really good performer you have to make sure that your ego is not the center but at the service of something else. To go one on one with Beethoven, you have to figure out who the guy is, what he’s doing, and how that’s encoded in the music. And then”--he pauses, as if this is the hardest part of all--”you have to realize that you are not Beethoven.”

That is not always self-evident: Ma, who is 42, has known since he was 4 that he possessed an astonishing musical talent. Ma’s father, Hiao-Tsiun Ma, was a music professor at Nanjing University in China and his mother, Marina, was a singer when they married in Paris in 1949. Their first child, a daughter, Yeou-Cheng, seemed destined to be a professional violinist until her younger brother’s facility on the cello edged her into an alternate career in medicine. When the family moved to New York in 1962, the 7-year-old Yo-Yo had already played for Isaac Stern and Pablo Casals. At Juilliard, he became a student of the venerated cellist Leonard Rose.

When he was 17, Ma put the brakes on his own transition from prodigy to pro by going to Harvard, where he expanded his international background--Chinese, French and American--into a curriculum laden with cultural studies. (It was an undergraduate anthropology course that eventually prompted his trip to the Kalahari.) Harvard proved crucial in other ways too: There he met his future wife, Jill Hornor, and came under the tutelage of composer Leon Kirchner, who 20 years later would write his Cello Concerto for Ma. It was also at Harvard that Ma tasted stardom, skipping out frequently on his classwork and on Cambridge (where he still lives) to give concerts around the world.

Ma has been a public figure ever since.

When the limo pulls up at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s Meyeroff Hall, Ma can’t make it past the security guard without being waylaid. It’s the father of a little girl who studies cello and who has come to shake his impressive hand. Still toting his instrument on his shoulder, Ma talks to the girl for several minutes, while fretting BSO staffers look at their watches and Zinman waits in his dressing room to go over the score of the Schumann concerto.

“What’s going on?” Ma asks the girl. “Nothing much,” she mumbles shyly. “Well, why not?” he guffaws. In Ma’s life, there is never nothing going on.

Later, while he warms up for rehearsal, the orchestra’s publicist pops in to see if he wants to do an interview with a local television station. (“Do you want me to do it?” Ma asks.) A teenage cellist afflicted with a brain tumor will be brought to the concert on a gurney and is hoping to meet him at intermission. A researcher from the National Institutes of Health would like to make a magnetic resonance image of Ma’s brain while he is playing the cello. His record company, Sony Classical, is flying a freelance journalist in from England for a half-hour interview. After the concert there are two obligatory receptions to go to, the next day a visit to a Baltimore public school.

Ma is constantly surrounded by minions and bathed in flattery, yet his style of playing seems designed to keep his ego from bloating. When he fronts an orchestra, it’s as though he is trying to melt into the ensemble and treat the fourscore musicians at his shoulders like so many partners in chamber music. During rehearsals, he often stands and plays facing his colleagues, communicating the way a string quartet, for instance, does, with blinks, shrugs and twitches. In performance, he arches his shoulders back into the ranks of the first violins, grins at the front-row players and turns his body as if to toss a passage back across the string section to the winds seated in the rear.

Ma is famous for his concentrated listening and for his ability to respond to the nightly variations of a live group performance. Just as important, he looks like he’s listening. Even when he is not playing, he rolls his torso with the music, as if barely able to contain the desire to conduct. It’s effective theater--a message to the audience that the music is not just about him--and an effort for which orchestra musicians, a notoriously cantankerous bunch, are deeply grateful.

“He makes sure that the word ‘soloist’ doesn’t mean that he is a separate entity, that he just plays to the public and the hell with everyone else,” says Baltimore Symphony principal cellist Mihaly Virizlay. “We all join him in a joint venture.”

In Ma’s ideal world, so too does the audience. Ma is not one of those extroverted, athletic performers who lob each phrase out into the auditorium so that the music goes caroming up into the bleachers. Two of the standards he plays most--the Elgar and the Schumann concertos--are autumnal, razzmatazz-less works that, in the hands of the lesser players, can easily lose their shape and dissolve into a meditative fug. Ma makes both concertos flicker with quiet, domestic passions, inviting his listeners to lean in and listen as hard as he does.

“My favorite way of performing is to share, not to say, ‘Look at me, how fast I play these notes, how I turn that phrase,’ ” he says in a voice he keeps soft enough to draw his interlocutors toward him. “I want to have as open a dialogue as possible with people on the stage and with the audience, so there’s a flow. It’s a very intimate form of performance and you can’t achieve that without making people comfortable.”

The fact is Ma is good at it. If the fond cliche of the classical musician is of someone eloquent in music but otherwise taciturn, inarticulate and periodically cruel, Ma is subversively gregarious and unfailingly genial. He stores up names, birthdays and children’s ages with the same assiduousness he devotes to memorizing a score. Even when he is hurried, he is never curt.

“When he’s talking to you,” says BSO administrator Miryam Yardumian, “he makes you feel like you’re the most important person in the world. He’s got this great talent for communicating. He reminds me of Bill Clinton that way.”

Indeed, Ma’s life can resemble a perpetual campaign. Part of “The Music Garden,” one of a set of six videos due out in February based on the six Bach Solo Cello Suites, documents his ultimately vain effort to get Boston to transform the arid brick tundra of its City Hall Plaza into a contemplative garden inspired by Suite No. 1, and to watch him romancing bureaucrats is to glimpse a master at work. Ma is also always willing to help out an orchestra by shaking the hands of any potential donors, and his cocktail party skills undoubtedly help set off the estimated $50,000-$60,000 fee he gets for a series like the one in Baltimore.

(He also has a knack for the diplomatic dodge. Asked how, as a Chinese American, he felt about sitting down to dinner with Jiang, given China’s record on human rights and its occupation of Tibet, his answer could have been scripted by the White House press office: “I’m interested in Tibetan culture and some day I’d like to go there. But at the same time you can’t close off communication. There are ways to work constructively.”)

Ma seems to have the born politician’s compulsive need to charm. His entire conversational strategy--his hair-trigger laughter, his tactic of interviewing his interviewers, his habit of heightening the sincerity in his voice by lowering the volume--seems aimed at eliding the difference between his fame and everyone else’s lack of it. If most people find him disarming, a few find him false.

“Yo-Yo is as glib as they come,” says someone who has worked with him and chooses to remain anonymous so as to be able to do so again. “He has oodles of charm and he comes across as very sincere and grounded in his art. But it’s an act. His personality is very superficial, his conversation is vulgar.”

It’s true that Ma, who is an indefatigable talker, does sometimes spin off into rhapsodies of clowning that would do a 10-year-old proud. A few minutes after first meeting Malena Ernman, a Swedish mezzo-soprano who is making her U.S. orchestral debut with the BSO in Elgar’s “The Music Makers,” Ma has dubbed the piece “The Mucus Makers,” and he regales her with a 20-minute riff on foods he thinks of as mucus-like (snails, oysters, oatmeal, grits).

During rehearsal, he undercuts his old friend David Zinman’s muted, businesslike demeanor by treating the orchestra to his repertoire of funny faces. Afterward, he insists that lunch with Zinman and Ernman be entirely off the record so that everyone can feel free to be “gross.” Ma claims that if he is a natural with children, it is because he has two of his own (Emily, 12, and Nicholas, 14), but it seems equally likely that he is in closer touch than many men with his own Inner Fifth-Grader.

Yet Ma is not a cynic. His charm may be conscious and the product of hard work, but it is not insincere: He believes profoundly in the power of relentless schmoozing.

“It’s part of cultural work,” he says, insisting that the care he takes with his personal contacts is the flip side of the concentration he devotes to music. “Look, the worst thing you can do at a reception is shake someone’s hand while you’re looking over his shoulder. And it’s possible to the same thing with a concert. You find yourself saying: ‘I’m here in this town today, but what I really want to do is the concert somewhere else tomorrow. You have a choice not to do it at all, but if you do it, you have to make sure you’re really there.’ ”

Really being there is not so easy for someone who spends much of his time living out of a suitcase and a cello case, and Ma uses his sociability to dilute the loneliness of his trade. In a question-and-answer session with schoolchildren, Ma is asked how many hours a day he practices, and he makes even that quintessentially solitary activity sound like a group experience: “There are many ways of practicing. If you call up a friend and talk about music, I call that practicing. Practicing is making a connection, and you can do that while you’re eating dinner or in the shower.”

A few minutes later, another kid asks what he would do if he were forced to stop playing the cello. He answers with a fantasy of conviviality that looks a lot like the life he leads. “Oh, lots of things,” he says. “I’d like to travel and meet lots of people.”

Bach’s six Cello Suites are among the most solitary music there is, packing a large ensemble’s worth of intricate polyphony into one melodic instrument. Performances of the suites have a simple, ceremonial quality, involving nothing but a chair and a cellist on a bare stage. Ma’s earliest associations with them are of a childhood spent in lonely concentration: When he was 5, his father had him inch-worming his way through these monumental pieces, memorizing two measures a day.

Yet he has managed to turn these pieces too into teamwork. The six-part video project “Inspired by Bach” matches each of the suites with a different extra-musical art: No. 1 with the landscape design of Julie Moir Messervy, No. 3 with the choreography of Mark Morris, No. 5 with the stylized Japanese theater of Kabuki master Tamasaburo Bando, No. 6 with the ice-dancing of Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean.

In each case, Ma let the collaboration shape his reading of the music (which he has recently re-recorded for the first time since he was 25). During the recording of the First Suite, he spread Messervy’s designs for the music garden out on the floor as he played, trying to absorb her visualization into his own interpretation.

“The Sarabande was going to be [represented by] a little inward space like a clearing in a forest, an arm that draws you in and envelops you,” Messervy recounts. “Before the take began, the producer pointed to this and said only, ‘The Sarabande is an arc.’ Yo-Yo nodded and the played whole thing almost in one breath.”

In the third suite, Ma bent the rhythms to the needs of Morris’ dancers and the demands of weight and gravity. Perhaps most improbably, Ma even tried tailoring the Second Suite to an acoustic space that does not actually exist: the vast, dark, gothic and fictional prison of the “Carceri d’Invenzione” etched by 18th century architect and engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi and reproduced for the film in a computer simulation.

Purists may see Ma’s interpretive flexibility as the surrendering of musical logic to the requirements of packaging, but his collaborators view it as a sign of intellectual suppleness.

“If you have no imagination, then Bach is only beautiful math,” Morris says. “The fact that Yo-Yo swings, that he gets it, the fact that he’s not rigid in any way--that’s musicianship.”

There is a risk, with someone of Ma’s voracious curiosity and with the resources that come with stardom, that his career could spin off into an unassimilated blur of awed discoveries--that a great professional could become a talented dabbler. But Ma believes he has a responsibility both to act on his interests and to keep developing new ones.

“There’s so much writing about the death of classical music,” he says. “That’s the moment to be innovative. When things are good you get lazy and being lazy is not being artistic. Being artistic is going to the edge and then reporting back.”

Besides, Ma says with a grin, “I’m just trying to justify my liberal arts education.

“I find it thrilling to talk to a material scientist or an economist because they work with different paradigms,” he says with the enthusiasm of an undergraduate pawing through a course catalog. As if to prove exactly how wide-ranging his sources of musical inspiration can be, he adds emphatically: “I actually care what’s going on in Canada.”

As Ma ticks off his reasons for delving into the music of Piazzolla, he begins to sound as though he is giving an introductory lecture in a foreign cultures seminar. It’s not the tango’s atmosphere of sweat and smoke that got him hooked, but an almanac’s worth of facts about Argentina: its onetime prosperity and literary prominence, the pall of secrecy and repression that descended on the country during successive military regimes, the ordinary horror of people simply vanishing, the demand for psychiatrists on the part of scarred survivors, the jumble of immigrants that make up the country’s population.

But there is a less cerebral reason that all this data has coalesced into Ma’s newest passion: the fact that Piazzolla’s nuevo tango, a once deeply controversial and now trendy blend of traditional tango, Bach, Bartok and a whiff of Weill, comes from a place where music really matters.

“Did you know that Astor Piazzolla got death threats?” Ma asks proudly. “People called and said: ‘If you write another piece like that, you’re dead.’ I love that. Imagine people caring so much about music!”