Background and career
Yo-Yo Ma (born October 7, 1955) is an American cellist. Born to Chinese parents in Paris, he was regarded as a child prodigy, and began to study the cello with his father at age four. Ma moved with his family to Boston at age seven and later to New York City, where he continued his cello studies at the Juilliard School before pursuing a liberal arts education at Harvard University. He has performed as a soloist with orchestras around the world, recorded more than 92 albums, and received 20 Grammy Awards. In addition to recordings of the standard classical repertoire, Ma has recorded a wide variety of folk music, such as American bluegrass music, traditional Chinese melodies, the tangos of Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla, and Brazilian music. He has also collaborated with artists from a diverse range of genres, including Bobby McFerrin, Carlos Santana, Chris Botti, Diana Krall, James Taylor, Miley Cyrus, Zakir Hussain, and Sting. Ma has been a United Nations Messenger of Peace since 2006. He has received numerous awards, including the Avery Fisher Prize in 1978, The Glenn Gould Prize in 1999, the National Medal of Arts in 2001, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011, Kennedy Center Honors in 2011, the Polar Music Prize in 2012, and the Birgit Nilsson Prize in 2022. He was named one of Time's 100 most influential people of 2020. Ma's primary performance cello is the Davidov Stradivarius, made in 1712 by Antonio Stradivari.
Ma's mother, Marina Lu, was a singer, and his father, Hiao-Tsiun Ma, was a Ningpo city violinist, composer, and professor of music at National Central University (now in Taoyuan, Taiwan). They both migrated from China to France. Ma's sister, Yeou-Cheng, played the violin and piano professionally before obtaining a medical degree from Harvard Medical School and becoming a pediatrician. The family moved to Boston when Ma was seven. From the age of three, Ma played the drums, violin, piano, and later viola, but settled on the cello in 1960 at age four. When three-year-old Ma said he wanted a big instrument, his father went to see Étienne Vatelot, a foremost violin maker in Paris who, after a chat, lent him a 1/16th cello. He jokes that his first choice was the double bass due to its large size, but he compromised and took up the cello instead. While Hiao-Tsiun handled much of his son's early music education, he eventually conceded that Ma required a more skilled teacher, and signed his son up for cello lessons with Michelle Lepinte. He began performing before audiences at age five and played for presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy when he was seven. At age eight, he appeared on American television with his sister in an event introduced by Leonard Bernstein. In 1964, Isaac Stern introduced them on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, and they performed a sonata by Giovanni Battista Sammartini. After moving to New York, Ma enrolled at the Juilliard School, where he studied with Leonard Rose and attended Trinity School and the Professional Children's School, from which he graduated at age 15. He appeared as a soloist with the Harvard Radcliffe Orchestra in a performance of Tchaikovsky's Variations on a Rococo Theme. Ma attended Columbia University, but dropped out. He later enrolled at Harvard College. Before entering Harvard, Ma played in the Marlboro Festival Orchestra under the direction of cellist and conductor Pablo Casals, Ma's childhood hero. He spent four summers at the Marlboro Music Festival after meeting and falling in love with Mount Holyoke College sophomore and festival administrator Jill Hornor during his first summer there in 1972. Even before that, Ma gained fame and performed with many of the world's major orchestras. He has also played chamber music, often with pianist Emanuel Ax, with whom he has a close friendship from their days at Juilliard. Ma received his bachelor's degree in anthropology from Harvard in 1976, and in 1991 received an honorary doctorate from Harvard.
Ma was featured on John Williams's soundtrack to the Hollywood film Seven Years in Tibet (1997). He was heard on the soundtrack of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003). He collaborated with Williams again on the score for Memoirs of a Geisha (2005). He has also worked with Italian composer Ennio Morricone and has recorded Morricone's compositions of the Dollars Trilogy, including The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, as well as Once Upon a Time in America, The Mission, and The Untouchables. He has recorded over 90 albums, 19 of which won Grammy Awards. He received the Award of Excellence from New York's International Center. In addition to his prolific musical career, Ma collaborated in 1999 with landscape architects to design a Bach-inspired garden. Known as the Music Garden, it interprets Bach's Suite No. 1 in G major, with the garden's sections designed to correspond to the suite's dance movements. Toronto enthusiastically embraced the design, originally planned for Boston, and it was built in the Harbourfront neighborhood. Ma was named Peace Ambassador by then-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in January 2006. He is a founding member of the influential Chinese-American Committee of 100, which addresses the concerns of Americans of Chinese heritage.
On November 3, 2009, President Barack Obama appointed Ma to serve on the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities. His music was featured in the 2010 documentary Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story, narrated by Academy Award winner Dustin Hoffman. In 2010, Obama announced that he would recognize Ma with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which Ma received in February 2011. In 2010, Ma was named Judson and Joyce Green Creative Consultant of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He launched the Citizen Musician initiative partnership in partnership with the orchestra's music director, Riccardo Muti. Also in 2010, he appeared on a solo album by guitarist Carlos Santana, Guitar Heaven: The Greatest Guitar Classics of All Time, playing alongside Santana and singer India Arie on the Beatles classic "While My Guitar Gently Weeps". In 2015, Ma performed with singer-songwriter and guitarist James Taylor on three tracks of Taylor's chart-topping album Before This World. In 2019, Ma directed the orchestra at the annual Youth Music Culture Guangdong. Ma is represented by the independent artist management firm Opus 3 Artists. Ma contributed to the charity tribute album The Metallica Blacklist, released in 2021, backing Miley Cyrus on a cover of the Metallica song "Nothing Else Matters". Ma serves on the Board of Trustees of the World Economic Forum.
Ma formed his own collective, the Silk Road Ensemble, named after the route across Asia which for more than 2,000 years was used for trade between Europe and China. His goal was to bring together musicians from diverse countries that were historically linked by the Silk Road. The ensemble's recordings are issued on the Sony Classical label. He also founded Silk Road Connect, an educational pilot program for children from middle schools in the United States, including New York City.
In 2022, Ma created Our Common Nature, a series of collaborative events bringing together diverse groups of local stakeholders for music and cultural exchange in wilderness locations in the U.S. (mostly in national parks or national historic parks). These events were documented in a seven-episode companion podcast of the same name, which was released in 2025, hosted by Ana González, and produced by Alan Goffinski.
