Art & Creativity Quote by Yo-Yo Ma

Yo-Yo Ma isn’t making a feel-good case for musical multiculturalism; he’s quietly dismantling the gatekeeping story that treats “classical” as a sealed European vault. By leading with “always,” he turns what’s often framed as a modern concession - diversity, fusion, crossover - into the default setting of music history. The line is doing rhetorical judo: if transnational exchange is the norm, then purity is the aberration, and the anxiety around influence starts to look less like scholarship and more like branding.

The phrase “people pick up whatever interests them” is deceptively casual. It pulls authority away from institutions and toward curiosity, listening, and imitation - the human-scale mechanics of how art actually travels. It also sidesteps moralizing. Ma isn’t arguing that borrowing is virtuous; he’s arguing it’s inevitable. That matters in a moment when cultural exchange is policed from two directions: traditionalists who fear dilution and critics wary of appropriation. His framing doesn’t erase power dynamics, but it refuses the fantasy that cultures develop in isolation.

Then comes the strategic pivot: “certainly a lot of classical music has absorbed influences from all over the world.” “Absorbed” is a loaded, almost biological verb - growth through intake - and it doubles as a reminder that the canon is already hybrid, full of imported rhythms, scales, instruments, and myths, even when program notes sanitize the lineage. Coming from a globally iconic cellist associated with the Silkroad project, the subtext is personal and political: listen wider, and stop pretending the borders were ever real.