Yo-Yo Ma

Yo-Yo Ma: "My parents, being musical, obviously hoped that I would love music. They were ambitious for me to do my best and set very high standards, and yet they were careful not to exploit me as a child prodigy. I am grateful for this. They seemed to understand that an early physical facility has to be combined with a mature emotional development before a healthy musical voice emerges.

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I had always kept my emotions bottled up, but at Meadowmount I just ran wild. The whole structure of discipline collapsed. I would leave my cello outside, not worrying if it might rain and run off to play ping-pong. I exploded into bad taste at every level. I took some white paint and decorated the stone walls with graffiti. When Galamian found out, he was horrified. I knew I had gone too far, and spent a whole day washing the walls.

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Yo-Yo struck out on his perilous journey to maturity, rebelling against the strict decorum of his childhood. He returned to Juilliard in the fall and clad in a leather jacket for his lesson with Leonard Rose, offered his teacher an outpouring of swear words. "But Mr Rose took it in his stride and saw me through that phase. All I was trying to do was to be accepted as one of the guys, and not be considered a freak."

At this critical time in his adolescence Yo-Yo began to doubt whether he wanted to become a professional musician. having played cello since he was four, he found it difficult to separate his personal identity from his musical one, "It seemed as if the course of my life had been predetermined and I very much wanted to be allowed a choice".

When he was sixteen, Yo-Yo went for the first time to study at Rudolf Serkin's summer school at Marlboro, Vermont. " I was there four summers and I think my love for chamber music really developed". He became engrossed in playing chamber music with his peers and has ever since believed that the basis of all music making is found in a chamber music approach.