As a child, you respond physically, tactically. You're delighted by sound, you're delighted by recognizing something. It's like hide and seek. Is it there? Is it not there? Is it this note? Is it not this note? It's one fantastic game.
Yo-Yo MaRead
A composition is always more than the sum of its parts. In other words, a really good piece of music is more than itself. It's sort of like a prism, which you can see from each facet a single totality.
Interpretation
What this quote means
A great composition transcends its individual elements and creates a unified experience.
Yo-Yo Ma's quote suggests that a musical composition, much like any piece of art, is not merely an aggregation of its components but instead embodies a greater significance and emotional impact. It emphasizes the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, inviting listeners to appreciate the interconnectedness and unity within the work, which can be perceived from multiple perspectives, similar to how a prism reveals different colors while remaining a singular object.
Themes
CompositionMusicArtUnityWholeness
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be shared during a music appreciation class to emphasize how various musical elements contribute to a whole.
More from Yo-Yo Ma
All quotes →There's a part of me that's always charging ahead. I'm the curious kid, always going to the edge.
Yo-Yo MaRead
I think that peace is, in many ways, a precondition of joy.
Yo-Yo MaRead
I think anybody who goes away finds you appreciate home more when you return.
Yo-Yo MaRead
When we enlarge our view of the world, we deepen our understanding of our own lives.
Yo-Yo MaRead
I learn something not because I have to, but because I really want to. That's the same view I have for performing. I'm performing because I really want to, not because I have to bring bread back home.
Yo-Yo MaRead
Similar quotes
the look of the sky as the day's blue blood runs out of its cheek.
Stephen KingRead
It is a magic book. Words mean things. When you put them together they speak. Yes, sometimes they flatten out and nothing they say is real, and that is one kind of magic. But sometimes a vision will rip up from them and shriek and clank wings clear as the sweat smudge on the paper under your thumb. And that is another kind.
Samuel R. DelanyRead
The most essential thing in dance discipline is devotion, the steadfast and willing devotion to the labor that makes the classwork not a gymnastic hour and a half, or at the lowest level, a daily drudgery, but a devotion that allows the classroom discipline to become moments of dancing too.
Merce CunninghamRead
I think pictures and words have the power to make us rich or poor.
Barbara KrugerRead
Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they may say something.
Georgia O'KeeffeRead
Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.
Jonathan FranzenRead