And nobody else would consider myself a journalist. I began to take on the life of being an interviewer even though i have a day job of running a private equity firm. How do you define leadership . What is it that makes somebody tick . Thank you very much for coming here today. We are at the Kennedy Center. You played here many times, i assume . Yoyo um, once or twice. David im very honored to be interviewing you, because i am the chairman of the Kennedy Center, and we gave you the Kennedy Center honors at one point not too long ago, and you have been the recipient of the president ial medal of freedom and every other award one can get. You are traveling around the world all the time. What drives you at this point when you are already so successful . Yoyo i want my wife to approve of me. David well, that is important. Yoyo well, what probably drives me is i want to be useful. So, i play the cello. And people like me to play. But maybe something you dont know is that my great passion through playing the cello, through doing music, is the fact i am incredibly passionate about people. David well, i do know that, in in part, because when i first met you, you didnt want to shake hands. You like to hug. Yoyo i am a hugger. David that shows you are passionate. When did you adopt the hugging technique . Did you always have that . Yoyo in france, you kiss, right . The hugging is just like its less, right . You kiss on both cheeks. In the United States, we shake hands. David ok. Yoyo so i did something midatlanticish. David so you adopted that, ok. It works out well, and i am always happy to be hugged by you. You were born in france. You grew up there for a couple of years. Your native language was mandarin or chinese . Yoyo chinese. David and then french . Yoyo yeah. David so you didnt start speaking english . Yoyo cant you tell . David its perfect. Yoyo some people say yes. David you have an older sister. She was playing the violin, if i understand it. So your father said, he was a music teacher, why dont you play the violin as well . So why did you not become a violinist . Yoyo well, first of all, my sister played much better than i did. And there is actually something in each person that is innate in terms of the kinds of sounds you like. So for example, i somehow didnt think i could make a good sound on the violin, and, but, so i did not play any other instrument for a while. I did not even here the sound of a double bass, but i saw one and thought as a fouryearold, that is a big, big giant instrument. I want to play it. As fouryearolds might do. David ok, and yoyo so i started saying, please give me a double bass. I want to play it. There was no double bass i could play. The cello was the next best instrument. David so you started playing, and did you notice other children were playing while you were practicing, and did that concern you . Yoyo well, i did not practice a lot. I had a father who was a very gifted teacher and thought about a lot of things, and one of the things he thought about was efficient practicing. So for example, the first piece of music i played was this piece. Yoyo ok. That sounds a little like its kind of fast, lots of notes, but can we make it simpler . David well, i am sure you can. Yoyo no, but i am sure you can. What is the first note . It is this. Right . Yoyo and the second note is this. Yoyo the third note is this. Yoyo and there is one fourth note, ok, now this is the first four notes. Now lets listen to what happens. Yoyo four notes, and the next four notes are yoyo wait a minute. I have heard those notes before. That was the third note, and this was the second note, so basically if i know how to play the first four notes yoyo it is just a permutation of two of those notes. David you make it sound easy, but it is not that easy. Yoyo no, but anybody can do that. Yoyo we will do that later. David lets go back to your situation. You go to new york. Your father is trying to talk his brother out of moving back to china. And then he said maybe this would be a better place for my son to learn to play the cello. Yoyo what happened is by total coincidence my sister, who played very well, violin, piano, are and we did a small performance someplace in manhattan on our last stop. And this francoamerican lady who had founded an Elementary School in new york was looking for a music teacher, had heard about this person, dr. Ma, and said i am kind of interested. She came to the concert, and then decided on the spot to ask him to teach at her school. And so had we not met this lady, we would have gone back to france and i would have, you know david you might be in private equity. Yoyo or i might be kissing you on both cheeks. David right. You were already fairly accomplished. Now because we are in the Kennedy Center yoyo it depends on how you define it. David by almost any normal standards you were already well known. You already met the man who is a considered the greatest cellist of the first half of the 20th century. How did you meet him and what did he think of your playing . Yoyo i was taken to him at age seven, and i have him writing something in my autograph book, and i played for him and he said, hm, very good, but you should always also go play baseball. Which is very interesting, because at that time he was in his upper 80s probably, and one of the things i remember, maybe in that autobiography or in an interview, he said, you know, i think of myself as a human being first, a musician second, and a cellist third. And i thought that was really interesting because, you know, where do we place our identity . For guys it is often what do you do, right . What is your profession . But the fact that he, you know, most people think of me as a cellist. But the human being part for him was the most important thing, and that was something i always thought about. David and he recommended you to Leonard Bernstein for an event in washington. There has come to us this year a young man aged seven, bearing the name yoyo ma. Now here is the cultural image for you to ponder as you listen a sevenyearold chinese cellist playing old french music for his new american compatriot. Welcome, yoyo ma and yeoucheng ma. [applause] david you performed at the age of seven in front of a live tv audience, but also president kennedy was there, so what was that like, fairly intimidating . Yoyo we were newly arrived people, immigrants, so for a seven year old, you know, did i know who president kennedy was . Probably not. Did i know he was an incredibly important person . Yes. And did i think about this for the rest of my life, about who this person was . Absolutely. David what about where you play . Yoyo live music is a communion. You dont have to be there. I dont have to be there. So if we are going to spend time together, lets make it count. David so you are at juilliard, you are playing with other people, and then you decide ultimately go to college at harvard. Yoyo the fields i was most interested in were anthropology and archaeology, and you may ask why. David because they both start with an a and you like the as . Yoyo exactly, before getting to the bs so the thing is, i was a very confused child because when you move, you know, everything, all the things that you hold to be solid and true visually, emotionally often, but certainly in terms of habit, people, it all changes. The rules are different. People say different things. So it was, you know, a lot of our french friends could not understand why we would move to the United States. And certainly a lot of americans thought, you know, this is the best country in the world. My parents kept telling me chinese culture, so incredibly important, so i was kind of befuddled because, you know, nobody can be not everybody can be right all the time, but anthropology gave me the way of studying values and culture that, where slight shifts in values create the society and becomes expressive in their arts, as well as in all of their various suits. David you get into harvard and realize there were a lot of smart people there. Yoyo yeah. David were there many of them who said i want to be the leading cellist in the world . Were you unique . There werent that many cellists . Yoyo i dont know anybody, or myself included, wanted to be Something Like that. One thing that is interesting in music is that mastering an instrument is there to serve the purpose of expression, and the purpose of doing something in music is to find your voice, so in music, there is no such thing as this is the greatest anything. It is about learning forever and finding the most concise way of expressing something as precisely as possible. David you began a career as a leading cellist and played for symphonies and on your own and so forth. As you have done that, you have now recorded 90 some albums, or maybe more than that . Yoyo i dont know. I dont keep track. David you have won 20 grammys, so you have become a dominant figure in the Classical Music world, so does that put a lot of pressure on you to perform up to the High Standard every single time, or do you relax a little bit . Yoyo you know the phrase, you are only good as your last performance. Right . Some of that is true because i think what you are talking about, and i dont want to belittle that, is external recognition in fact. Being a musician is internal development. It is sort of, you know, there is a tremendous emphasis you collect art. What makes one person that artist and nobody else, right . What makes you David Rubenstein and nobody else . What makes the sounds that i make only possible because of some wish to hear certain sounds a certain way . And i think that is what i spend my life on, and so winning awards is fabulous because it gives you more chances to do something that you might wish to do. You know, we are talking about external recognition versus internal satisfaction and fulfillment. They are Different Levels of pleasure, right . I think the levels of deep fulfillment, and this is where, you know, the loose term im going to use, culture, comes along because if you do things in arts and sciences and culture, your wish is to build something that is strong enough, a building block, that someone else can build on top of. David today, you have a life of playing around the world, so how do you pick where to go every year . How far in advance is your schedule set . Yoyo i really dont mind what i play and where i play, but i care how i play and who i play for and with. I have kind of decided early on that whether i play in new york , or jakarta or peoria, doesnt matter, or in waco, texas, the most important thing i can do is be totally present and totally engaged. There is nothing more important. It is the focus that is there, and what that means is not being present in that im delivering a package and here is the package. More like, ok, if i play for a group of people, whether it is kindergartners or innercity school, white house, you think about what you are trying to say, who you are saying it to, but the only thing that is important is that they remember something that will make them perform an action afterwards. It is living material. David do you ever have a problem that youre thinking about one thing while you are playing a piece . Yoyo when i am playing, it is about absolute concentration. Nothing. David you dont have any a mental lapses . Yoyo i can sometimes feel mental lapses coming on. David do you ever forget the piece and the notes you play . You dont use music. Yoyo i do sometimes, and sometimes i dont. What i tell people is if you want to memorize pieces, do that before you are 21 years old, because whatever you learn before 21, you remember forever. After you are 40, forget it. David what about where you play . Is there one music hall you think that is better for acoustics . Yoyo so again, some people say this is the greatest hall, therefore it must be fantastic to play. Yes, that gives a certain amount of pleasure, but the greater pleasure is the energy in the audience. Again, we are talking about who you are playing for. Music, live music, it is a communion. You dont have to be there. I dont have to be there. So if we are going to spend time together, lets make it count, because if it does not count, if you forget what you did today, tomorrow, and if i forget what i did today or tomorrow, what is the purpose of doing it . David you are seen as a symbol of the importance of culture. Yoyo i have to prove it to myself, let alone to the rest of society, that something is worthwhile. That my humanity or my playing three notes on the cello means something. David so you obviously made a decision in your career to do more than Classical Music. Yoyo music to me is expression of ideas, thoughts, and feelings. Spatial structures in sound. I do not think of Classical Music as separate from the rest of the world. I would like to think that Classical Music is part of world music, which it is not thought of as world music. I think Classical Music is one of the best things the world has invented. To make that category different really upsets me. We started as an idea, a group of musicians getting together and seeing what might happen. David the silk road ensemble and the silk road endeavor that you put together, could you explain what that was about, why you did that, and why it is important to you . Yoyo well, i think it is a response to the kinds of questions you are asking me about Classical Music. Sort of, you know, wait a minute, how come i was asking those same questions of myself, and what i discovered, you know, in beginning to find some answers that first of all, there are so many ways of expression through sound that are, some have been traditions that are thousands of years old. There are many Classical Musics, and i thought that Classical Music in itself should actually be able to, because that is part of its tradition, to encompass a larger world. Yoyo yoyo one thing that music does, it connects peoples conscious and subconscious. People respond to music both emotionally, but also analytically, and so if you can combine both of those things in one form, you can go very deep into communicating content. David you are seen as a symbol of the importance of culture, and is this an important part of your life and your legacy . What you want to do is convince people that music and other kinds of artistic performances are very valuable for society . Yoyo well, it is back to the old question, who are people . Why do they do what they do . How do people learn . What is the meaning of why we live . You know, i think that is something i have to actually its not a theoretical thing for me, because if i have to play a performance on four hours sleep, and i have to leave my family, two thirds of the time that we have had children growing up, two thirds, and i know you travel like crazy. You better have a good reason why you are doing that, so you get to that existential level. You have to care. You have to have the reason why it is important, and as i get older and as i observe what you are doing, you get more and more involved in societal issues. You think about patriotism. You think about civilization. You think about civicness. I think so too, but from my angle, from playing little notes. Think why should that matter saying why should that matter when all of these things are going on . I have to prove it to myself, let alone to the rest of society, that something is worthwhile. That my humanity or my playing three notes on the cello means something. David so i want to thank you for what you have done for the country and thank you for what you have done for the world, and in bringing people to know much more about the music we are hearing you perform. And i want to thank you for the Kennedy Center involvement. You have been an advisor to the Kennedy Center. You have been very helpful in many other ways. Yoyo thank you. Are you ready for your cello lesson . David i am. Yoyo thats it. You did it. David wow. Im ready. Thank you very much. Bravo. David thank you very much. Shery coming up on bloomberg best, the stories that shaped the week in business around the world. A new year brings a new assessment of global risks from eurasia group. Distinguished guests delve into the details. The number one risk ceos see out there is geopolitical. This transition from the u. S. Is not going to china. China is creating an alternative. The unpredictability of key leaders, the lack of a north star with the United States stepping back in so many ways. Shery so what else is new . Mifid ii rules go into effect, and the u. S. Releases the old years file jobs report
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