Yo Yo Ma's Reading List

"it took me two decades to connect with the book"

"I boarded with Dionne Searcey’s "In Pursuit of Disobedient Women," which recounts her years as The Times’s West Africa bureau chief. I landed with the magic of her experience."

"Looking at the universe through a child’s gaze, full of wonder, wisdom and innocence, is a perspective we never want to lose as adults."

"Casals was one of the greatest cellists of the last century. He rediscovered Bach’s cello suites for generations of musicians and listeners, he stood always for liberty and against despotism."

"Ted’s book introduced me to the people who live there; I could hear them, understand their interpretation of nature and of the universe."

"Imagine, a world of leaders bound together with common values. We could use that today."

"The history of Haiti, through the memoirs of Alexandre Dumas, whose father was a French general born in Haiti (then the French colony of Saint-Domingue) to a white French nobleman and a black slave. We hear so much about the modern-day struggles of Haiti, but I had only a vague notion of its history, that Haiti was among the first colonies in the Americas to declare independence and the first nation to abolish slavery for good."

"Twenty-three years ago, when I was first thinking about the Silkroad Ensemble, I had many intense talks with Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said, who were in the process of creating the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. Said would always quote Forster: ‘Only connect!’ But it took me two decades to connect with the book."

"I always try to get on a plane with a book that will give me new perspective on the destination. Late in February, just before the pandemic really changed how we live, I visited West Africa for the first time, to play Bach’s cello suites in Dakar. I boarded with Dionne Searcey’s In Pursuit of Disobedient Women , which recounts her years as The Times’s West Africa bureau chief. I landed with the magic of her experience. Like cheating!"

"Joseph Horowitz on Toscanini helped give a social and historical context to the world of classical music that I encountered when I moved to New York as a child. The book gave me a way to see how deeply everything changed after World War II, how the immigration of European musicians to the United States helped shape the evolution of classical music for a good half-century and gave me my own musical foundation."

"Casals was one of the greatest cellists of the last century. He rediscovered Bach’s cello suites for generations of musicians and listeners, he stood always for liberty and against despotism, and he lived by a simple philosophy that has become my own: He thought of himself as a human being first, a musician second and, only third, a cellist. I met him when I was 7 and asked him for his autograph, and he gave me some advice: ‘Always make time for baseball.’ It took me decades to realize he was..."

"In the ’90s, I discovered the work of an ethnomusicologist named Ted Levin. I think the first of his books that I read was The Hundred Thousand Fools of God . This was in the years after the Soviet Union breakup gave birth to more than a dozen countries that we knew as the ”stans.’ Ted’s book introduced me to the people who live there; I could hear them, understand their interpretation of nature and of the universe. A few years later, Ted became one of my partners in creating the Silkroad Ens..."