"I remember that, really early on in life, in thinking about what I wanted to do, what’s life about . . . I had one thought, which is that I really wanted to understand things." Yo-Yo Ma says this about halfway through a conversation that ranges from the purpose of art to the nature of human organization and over a lot in between. Ma may be the world’s most recognizable cellist, but he’s interested in a whole lot more than playing the cello. Music, it seems, is his primary vehicle for understanding things.
Ma’s proclivity for broad themes and big ideas is particularly germane to his latest project, his work on the soundtrack for Naqoyqatsi, the final film in Godfrey Reggio’s "Qatsi" trilogy, which will be opening in Boston theaters this week. Like the two that preceded it — Koyaanisqatsi ("life out of balance") and Powaqqatsi ("life in transformation") — Naqoyqatsi ("life as war") sets a collage of diverse images from different media to a disquieting score by Philip Glass. (Glass’s ensemble will also accompany Koyaanisqatsi in a live performance November 2 at the Orpheum Theatre; call 617-876-4275.) The sum total is another extended meditation on the interaction between human life and technology.
Ma plays the score’s extensive cello solos, many of which function as "tissues" that connect sequences of images. The solos also provide a restrained, eloquent gloss on Glass’s insistent, churning music — much the same way that we viewers give Reggio’s wordless images their moral valence. And for Ma, our contribution is an essential ingredient of the artistic process. "It invites the viewer to be a participant," he says of Naqoyqatsi. "It’s an invitation to think. It’s not a finished consumer product; the product is finished when someone views it, engages in it, participates in it."
Such reflections make an interview with Ma more like a philosophy seminar than an interview with a musician. When he mentions the soundtrack’s conductor, Michael Riesman, he notes that Michael’s father, David Riesman, is the author of the 1950s sociology classic The Lonely Crowd. And he’s never been content to follow the standard path of the great instrumentalist, mining the same repertoire over and over for an entire career; instead, he’s taken on projects that break down barriers between cultures and art forms. From Appalachian hoedowns with Edgar Meyer to the films based on Bach’s six Unaccompanied Cello Suites to the East-West exchanges of his Silk Road Project, Ma wears his intellectual and artistic restlessness on his sleeve.
He also finds his art’s ability to bring opposites together to be one of its great advantages. "It always seemed kind of false to say, ‘You’re in this field, you can’t do that.’ What I love about music is that you can join paradoxes together. The very form of music invites multiple layers, and some of those layers can contradict each other. And through the contradictions, you get depth."
That’s another key word in Ma’s vocabulary. He isn’t content with mere gestures toward the unfamiliar; he wants to understand it and make it part of his own vocabulary. "The thrill is that you find a way to adopt something that seems unfamiliar as your own. And once you do that, it’s yours to play around with, and your life becomes richer."
For Ma the fun of exploring the unknown and making connections is what keeps the game interesting. But it isn’t just about keeping himself interested — he has weightier issues in view. "If you’re thinking about truth or value, then you almost have to do it. Otherwise you’re only continuing a kind of consumerism that Frank Zappa satirized: ‘I like that song, I want another just like it.’" And the last thing you can imagine Yo-Yo Ma doing is something just like what he’s done before.
NUPTIALS, PAST & PRESENT. Newlyweds Anne-Sophie Mutter and André Previn take the stage this Saturday with the BSO to reprise Previn’s Violin Concerto, the work he wrote for her that won her heart. (It had its world premiere here in March.) Speaking of happy marriages: this Friday and Saturday, Ulysses and Penelope reunite when Boston Baroque gives us a semi-staged version of Claudio Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria. Boston Baroque’s previous productions of Monteverdi’s La favola d’Orfeo and L’incoronazione di Poppea were worthy efforts, so this one should be on your calendar — Monteverdi’s operas are masterpieces, and you won’t hear them anywhere else in these parts. And there’ll be plenty of songs about food, wine, and joy (all ingredients of a good wedding) when the Orlando Consort performs at the First Congregational Church in Harvard Square next Friday, November 1, in a Boston Early Music Festival event. This Renaissance vocal group also has an outstanding new CD out, The Call of the Phoenix. No, it’s not a musical plug for this publication but rather a collection of rare 15th-century English church music, much of it anonymous and previously unrecorded.
