Episode Four: Yo-Yo Ma CL: From Public Radio International, I'm Christopher Lydon, and this is the Whole Wide World. The global cellist, Yo-Yo Ma, an American superstar, born is Paris of Chinese parents, has been on a planetary musical mission for years now, exploring tango in Argentina, string-folk music in Appalachia, African roots music in the Kalahari desert. From Mongolia to Azerbaijan, Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road CD had sharpened our consciousness of a new, universal music just waiting to be played. Then, out of the blue, the catastrophic assault of September 11th put a jagged edge on the basic question of global cultures. "What happens," as Yo-Yo Ma put it, "when strangers meet?" His answer is a marriage of musical minds, when he sits down with a Persian spike fiddler or a Brazilian drummer. But in the din of what's now called the "clash of civilizations," can we still hear that harmony, that hope? Yo-Yo Ma, rebuilding culture in a time of war is next...on the Whole Wide World. [Music] CL: I'm Christopher Lydon...this is the Whole Wide World...Yo-Yo Ma, the global cellist, is our guest this hour. He has rewritten the Kipling line of a century ago that "East is East and West is West..." Yo-Yo Ma is proof that the twain don't just meet each other coming and going now; they intertwine each other, out there in the world, and in here in hearts and personal stories and in art. The Whole Wide World is a conversation about the global riddles of identity, technology, and power in a perilous time. In this hour it's about culture, specifically music. It's about the human impulses when strangers meet, to reach across the fear and unfamiliarity of the moment and make music in counterpoint and harmony. Listen for an alternative in all this to the so-called "clash of civilizations." Yo-Yo Ma hears an invitation to a renaissance. Yo-Yo Ma was born in Paris into a Chinese family that was heading west. His parents pointed Yo-Yo Ma and his cello to the European classical music of Bach, Haydn and Brahms, and then to Harvard College and a superstar career in American concert halls and record charts. But his road has circled back to performances and epiphanies in Asia. With the Chinese composer Tan Dun he made the soundtrack of the hit movie "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." For SONY Records, he threw himself recently into the "Silk Road" project to distill the contemporary musics along the ancient trade routes connecting Japan to China to India to Persia, to the Caucasus and North Africa and Europe. Before that, he's been exploring with his cello to Africa, Argentina, and the Appalachian US. So he is a global celebrity who's also a global searcher, scouting for the roots of music in human nature and in the Mongolian reaches of the old Silk Road, turning up unearthly new voices. CL: Yo-Yo Ma, I keep wondering who gets to have a voice in this new, rather concentrated global culture? Obviously, your singer Agombatara Kungazall has a voice in this culture. YYM: She does. And we call her "Zola" for short, because otherwise, it's just too long to pronounce her whole name. And Zola is 27 years old; she just got married; she's from Olunbatar, Mongolia, and the way that people discovered her voice was when she was singing one day to herself; [she's] not at all musically trained... CL: Not herding sheep or anything? YYM: Oh, actually probably...she comes from a large family, and probably rides, and I know she does, but someone heard her singing, and thought it was a voice from the radio. When they found out that it was a live person, the next year literally, she got a scholarship to go to art school, and we found out, and since we've worked with her she has just thrived, and blossomed and developed, more and more learning English, singing better, and dealing with audiences, smiling, and I think... CL: Learning to coach you on the cello, I read? YYM: [She's] now teaching me how to play the morenhoy, which is their horse-head fiddle, an instrument that has...you know, literally, instead of a scroll, it has a horse-head, which I think of as a precursor to the modern cello. So, people who have talent, who have something to say, who have...who know something deeply from someplace...but when you look deeply enough in that one place, often you find that what we think of as the very thing that comes from that one place, comes also from other places. CL: There are other roads out there, besides the Silk Road, and Yo-Yo Ma has been down a lot of them. He went to the Kalahari Desert in Africa; and he had his tango period; and with the fiddler Mark O'Connor he's made some popular Appalachian recordings like this "College Hornpipe." [CL to YYM]: I keep thinking of the kind of circular relationship between West Africa, the Caribbean, American jazz; how many more are there? And how many more do you want to do? YYM: Well, you know, I'm not about doing volume, but I think my activities are obviously really informed by three things: just being born as someone from Chinese parents in France; living in the States (that's a multicultural experience from childhood on); my education and my experiences traveling as a musician. I meet people, and when something that I can encounter gets really, really exciting, and if someone takes me to what is so exciting about that place, I will then start to investigate. [Music] YYM: I'm doing something on Brazil right now. I worked this summer with fabulous Brazilian musicians. I'm a citizen...US citizen...I know so little about our neighbor to the south. I've got to find out, and since I love the music, I'm going to start and investigate. And over the last two years...you know, I've just been listening to a lot of people, and finally last summer, it...just all the knowledge accumulated to one place, and we made a recording, and that triangle that you talk about, the jazz or West African music, Cuban music, [and] it includes Brazil. And why is Brazilian music... CL: It includes New Orleans too, I understand? YYM: Absolutely. New Orleans, Cuba, West Africa, and Brazil. There's actually...there's...why does one music develop into jazz, another...what becomes Cuban music? And why is Argentinean music different from Brazilian music? You can examine that from, you know, cultural, historical context, and you can actually hear it in the music. CL: Of course, this sort of thing has happened before, as when Stan Getz's jazz horn married Brazil's bossa nova in the 1950s. Paul Simon's "Graceland" album was inspired by the South African chorus Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Louis Armstrong went to Ghana and discovered that he was really Ghanaian. Dizzy Gillespie went to Cuba and found Chano Pozo, the percussionist that changed his music forever. [CL to YYM]: I wonder, as you listen to these things, and know the history, what are these sort of dips back into the exotic, that strike you as most moving, and most authentic? And to be blunt...I mean...not gimmicks? YYM: I think that...I make just a difference between consumerism and participation. You know, if I really want to listen to great Brazilian music, I can go and buy lots of CDs, and appreciate it. That's...you know, or go to a club. I can go meet musicians. But to actually learn what happens from the inside, I have to participate; it's...so, the invitation for really knowing something. It's like you're dropping into Ghana; you're dropping into Jamaica or Singapore, and dealing with what you know here: Radio, communication, and finding out what is someplace else. CL: And generally, even when I'm participating, I'm just listening as hard as I can... YYM: Well... CL: ...and you probably are, too. YYM: It's a huge learning process. CL: I listened to the Silk Road CD, and I'm fascinated by the many duets you do in there, but also just individual voices. Shane Shanahan fascinates me. He's no Central Asian, but then Wootong, Wooman...what are these confrontations like? YYM: Well, we just came back from Italy. We were in Florence, Milan, and Rome. Shane Shanahan was asked, as an ensemble member, to create a piece. He has gone for many years to Turkey, because he loves Turkish music. So, he speaks Turkish...he speaks...and he came up with a melody, a piece, and within two days it became a ten-minute piece, just created on the spot... CL: Working it out? YYM: Working it out...band music. Shane is one of these people who can then...who can play a Kurdish song with, you know, with Persian musicians, Iranian musicians, and just read what they're doing, and get into the groove, as a tableau player; he plays the canuin; he plays many, many instruments. Wootong, he plays the shun, which is a mouth organ; it sounds like an organ; it's a Japanese instrument; it's the sho. We think of the shang as a Chinese instrument; it actually comes from South Asia. So, you know, it traveled, and then became a Chinese instrument, the way we know it. Its origins are elsewhere. Wootong is one of the...you know, great, traditional musicians of China. He's 30 years old. CL: Also, a bit of the rock star in him. YYM: And he's a big rock star, huge rock star, in China. So, the fact that he can travel with us sometimes, and play with us...and he just is a great musician; he's a great performer, and a great musician. How do you categorize him? We can't find the words in our language at this moment to categorize what he does. CL: Duke Ellington's greatest compliment [was] to call someone "beyond category." That's where we're all trying to get, right? YYM: I think so. I think we're actually trying to describe certain numbers of people that...or to describe a certain reality that now exists, but we actually don't have the words. Wooman is another person, who like Wootong, she plays the peepa, which is a pear-shaped lute, and the peepa, it's origins are from the Middle East. It was the oud that became the lute in Europe, and became the peepa in China, and the only difference, as Wooman explains, is that the oud you play at a 45-degree angle with the...and over a 1,000 year period, it moved to the East, and by the time it went to China, you actually play with the instrument pointing straight up, so it took...45 degrees, 1,000 years, and Wooman... CL: And you're just a young saxophonist on this. YYM: Exactly! CL: What's the test for you - applied to yourself, but also to them - of the musicians that can transcend, that can get beyond a native scale or structure or head? YYM: Someone who is deeply passionate about the thing that they know, the tradition, or the style that they know, and who is also generous, and curious. Those are the criteria. Generosity is unbelievably important. You can't stay inside yourself, and participate and learn something new. Curiosity, generosity, ability to somehow...or at least having a wish to be involved in something else, I think those are crucial characteristics. CL: Next, how Yo-Yo Ma got his groove back with Persian and Brazilian drummers. You're listening to the Whole Wide World, produced in association with WGBH Radio Boston, from PRI, Public Radio International. [Music] CL: I'm looking in a way for the bad news here, or trying to find something to deal with the question of what happens to the native musics. I heard a lot about it in Africa, where musicians in Ghana are out of work, partly because of a curfew, but more because the big record companies can put Britney Spears on the air in Ghana, at the expense of Ghanaian musicians, and then there's the drum machine. They genuinely worry that the computerized drum is going to kill the drum tradition, where it begins, and where it reaches its highest thing...drummers are out of work. YYM: Playing with the percussionists that we do...with Joe Gramley, Mark Suter, Shane Shanahan, Sundeb Dass from New Delhi, we...I have learned more about music from these percussionists in the last two years, because they are not drum machines, and because what they do is totally alive, and there's a feel to it. And Brazilian music, playing with Cera Battista, and the way he does the...a motoric rhythm that...where a drum machine would be absolutely...you know, lined up...his beat...you know, one, TWO, three, four; one, TWO, three, four...it's like the second-sixteenth pops out; it's uneven, and it makes you go crazy. It gives you such an unbelievable groove; you can't...I'm a terrible dancer; it makes me want to...you know, to go on the floor. I think it's...how do you keep it from being taken over by other things? By having people who believe enough in the expression of a music, and who is willing to be generous to teach. [Music] YYM: Cayhan Calhore, a wonderful caymunchey player, lives in Tehran...part of the time in New York. He told me how he teaches. Young kids, he takes them hiking; he takes them on trips; he talks to them about poetry, philosophy...old style teaching. You know? It's like sort of...and so, you open up a world that is so inviting, and so amazing, that if you're looking for something...you're looking for a way of expression. You're at the age where, you know, the world is wide open, and this strikes you. My gosh, you commit the next 40 years of your life to try and explore that thing! And I think each one of these masters has that capacity to excite, because the content is so broad, so deep. [Music] YYM: What are the great transnational ideas, that really are exciting to learn about, [that] would make a 15-year-old want to go and say, "I really want to learn this. I want to go into it." You could do this in many, many ways. Wootong had the suggestion, which is to say, "Why don't you look at the nine great rivers that flow from the Tibetan plateau...that, you know, flow into the Ganges, into the Indus, the longest river that goes into the Kazakhstan, the Yangtze River, the river that goes into the Mekong...there's a book written about it recently...and why don't you look at it as"...and that those rivers provide some of the worlds fresh water, all the cultures, the religions; and it gives time, space, depth into...a way of looking at culture. And now look at what Pete Seeger did with "That's a River." Find a way to actually say, "What does go on in the Ganges?"...There are great stories. CL: You should go. YYM: I would love to go. And... CL: It sounds like a "Kim" adventure. YYM: Yes, it could be. But it could be a wonderful way to then say, "Okay, let's look at all the music around it. Let's look at..." Then you can follow this...you know, history, the world, geography can all come to life, and we in the end, have a better understanding of politics...if you know all the trials and tribulations of what actually happens along the cradles of civilization of, let's say, a river. That's one thought. That's better than talking about a drum machine, because it's not...you're not talking about "this is taking over." Let's talk about some ideas that are really, really powerful, that can actually...if you know that, and you can feel empathetically closer to another place, and another people, you...I promise you, we end up making different decisions. CL: But it's learning, learning, learning...listen, listen, listen. YYM: It's all about learning, and if you really learn, and the difference is...there's a difference between...and you know this much better than I, even, that there's a difference between information and knowledge, right? So, when do you turn information into knowledge? And when do you actually internalize knowledge? And when you really internalize knowledge, you could then start to create within that form. So, it's...you know, so an artistic point of view of all of this is you have to understand your own boundaries. You have to be able to have someone take you inside something else, and once you begin to learn that vocabulary, you can participate. You're not a consumer anymore. You're actually really, really closely allied to that other form. Then, you come back to your own form much richer for it, because you have better ears. CL: Will we ever hear a whisper of the influence of this experience in your performances of Haydn, or Dvorak, or Bach? YYM: All the time. What I learned about groove in the last six months...and I just did a whole bunch of, you know, gala concerts of concertos...different concertos...Shostakovich, Haydn, Tchaikovsky, whatever...I'm practicing more, and more carefully with more devotion, because I'm saying, you know, "Have I been as careful with this as before?" Have I invested as much of that kind of attention for that kind of groove, which can happen in Haydn or in Tchaikovsky because I now hear better, and as a result, I'm playing more relaxed, and I think I'm a better musician. CL: Listen to some of the groove he's referring to...Tchaikovsky's rococo variations for cello and orchestra. [Music] YYM: So, it's a constantly changing thing, but the important thing... CL: This is so interesting...you know, just to go back, two year ago, I was interviewing Segei Ozawa, and I asked you, "What should I ask him?" And you, probably mischievously, said, "Ask him how music is different after you're 60." And he said, "You ask Yo-Yo, how music different after 40." (Laughter.) And then he said...but he was marveling that same day...he said...you know, you had just finished three or four concerts in a row, playing two Haydn concerti...he said, "Yo-Yo fantastic. Yo-Yo fantastic. He play[s] Haydn different every time. Every time is different." And it's going to be different the next time, I gather. YYM: I hope so. (Laughter.) Well, you know, absolute reproduction for a live musician is death. You know? A lot of people say, well, text music and improvised music; they're such different forms. And I'd like to say that when we try and work together with people who are both traditional musicians and improvisatory musicians, and you have text musicians working together, and suddenly you're either having the improvisatory musicians work with text, or you're having the text musicians go the other way; it becomes the same thing. We're operating, then, in the same kind of sphere, but with slightly different strengths. So, I think that if...ultimately, it's a question of creativity, and ongoing developing creativity, and I believe that the more you learn, the more...I mean, deeply learn...I mean, acquiring knowledge, internalizing it...the more creative you can be, because you have more to draw on, and I think the two have to go together. [Music] CL: Yo-Yo Ma, I'm wondering in a different mode, what light does the cultural and musical thing shed on the political thing? And I'm thinking very specifically of coming back from Cuba a couple years ago, and the question in my mind was: how in the world did we ever get into a kind of cultural confrontation with a country where everybody (young, old, lighter shade, darker shade, rich or poor, everybody) can dance like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers? I mean, they're all sort of spectacular; even walking down the street, you feel a kind of Rumba grace and health and vitality and joy and pleasure in being a human being, and how did this happen? YYM: Well...and the reverence for antique American cars. (Laughter.) CL: Well, they make do with what they have. YYM: Yeah, yeah. CL: You sound wonderfully unpolitical, but I wonder...are you also thinking about music in a time of world crisis, political crisis? Does that enter into your sort of...into your dreams and your worries? YYM: Well, I think about what my parents went through. My father was born in 1911. He went through...well, obviously World War I in China, the Japanese invasion, civil war in China; he experienced World War II beginnings in China, as well as in Paris. So, I mean, a lot of my parents' lives had to do with instability. So, I'm an immigrant to the United States, and I don't take that for granted. I don't take stability for granted. I feel very lucky that, you know, I haven't been involved in any wars and whatever. But I think that World War II did a tremendous amount to destroy the fabric of the music that I play...that I was winged on...and so I see the effects of war on people, and on culture, (which is my goal to understand,) and to...always to try and move forward. I don't think that's a political act. That's a human act. CL: How do these...this tremendous cultural sort of lifelines that are thrown to each other, get tangled up in politics so bad? YYM: I don't know, because politics is not something that I, you know, choose to really engage in, because I think the work in culture is a separate frame. CL: Really? YYM: And I think that because...well, political development, certainly, in our country has cycles...four years, it changes, whatever. In the gestation period for a style to become what then it took for it to develop, and to become known, that is a complete different timeframe. It's not a business cycle. It is often longer; it's messier; it's scrappier; it's less transparent. However, I believe that that thing that you say, well, how come people do this so well, and how come we get tangled up in it? I think that if you...if we knew more of what is really precious to somebody else, and they...somebody else knows what is precious to you and me, we actually start a different conversation. You have less room...you have fewer misunderstandings. CL: You've spoken of the Silk Road Project...this wonderful phrase...what happens when strangers meet? And yet, we're told now that what happens when strangers meet is we have a clash of civilizations, and maybe a good, shoot 'em up war. How do we deal with this? YYM: Well, I think that, again, just from the cultural side, the ensemble went to Syria last year. We played in Allepo for the Agha Khan's architecture prize, so it's for...you know, the architecture prize is given to architecture that is somehow built in the Muslim world, anywhere from Egypt or North Africa to Indonesia, and there are so many ways to express that in music, from the Sarabande in a Bach suite, which came from Moorish Spain...was a lewd and lascivious dance in the 1400s, and then became...now we know it's part of a German piece of music. How did that happen? You show the transnational influences from Bach to Ravel, to Azeray music, to Persian music, to Indian music, and suddenly we find that what has flowed in music and exists in those cultures, and that continue[s] to exist, show a much greater span of understanding, and of tolerance, and of the flow of music and ideas, than we can presently give in political terms, as well as in economic terms, and I think that we're going to Tajikistan, to Kyrgystan, and Kazakhstan in the spring... CL: You can go to these places now? YYM: We're definitely going. And not only that, we're going to work with...you know, students there...We actually just now through Siemen's brought a wonderful composer from Tashkent, Dmitri Yanavunovsky, and to a Siemen's factory in Piscataway, New Jersey, a hearing aid factory; and he just wrote a piece; he was in residence for two months, and it was just performed last night in Piscataway and Hoboken. And people were really wildly excited about it. So, he's going to go back, taking the experience of living with a family in New Jersey with the factory, and work with this, work with those memories. And we will also, then, when we go to...hopefully, we will also go to Uzbekistan...when we go, we will engage with kids, either to play with them, to work, and show what's possible. CL: We're listening to Yo-Yo Ma making old music new and new music approachable. There's a thought when we come back about rebuilding culture in a time of war. You're listening to the Whole Wide World from PRI, Public Radio International. CL: Isn't is strange and sad and ironic, I mean, Herot, one of the Muslim capitals in a lordly, beautiful place in the Medieval period is now another one of those sort of rocks-bouncing ruins of Afghanistan. You planted the consciousness with this project of a kind of universal music in our midst on the eve, as it were, of September 11, and this enormous confrontation. It's striking how the Silk Road coincides in an extraordinary way with the axis of evil that George W. Bush, our president, points to. I mean, you've bitten off more than you ever imagined chewing in a certain way, in a kind of culture, culture to save us from our politics, or to save us from division; a kind of coherence to save us from...polarization. You're in a big fight now. YYM: I'm not... CL: Aren't you? YYM: I really don't think we're in a fight at all, because what we're actually doing is to look for precious things, and to celebrate what was created that was precious, and to continue to try to seed different ways of continued creativity. I think that's...I mean, the alternative of that is destruction. It's far better to create than to destroy, and you can... CL: Amen! YYM: ...always look for what is positive, and what...it takes a lot to create something. We're just...you know, looking in Florence, and looking at the seeds of what actually became the Renaissance. It is amazing to see how long, and how many people contributed to what we now call this Renaissance period, and what was involved. We can always work towards another Renaissance, another period where there's giant creativity all throughout, but in order to do that, we actually have to iron out a number of things. One of them is openness, common vocabulary...you know, whether it's improvised music, text music; how do you...can you talk together? So, to answer the question do we know who are neighbors are? Can we afford not to know who our neighbors are? This is one good way...you know, there are many ways, but this is certainly one good way to approach, and to slowly unlock the places that are stuck. I don't speak your language, how can we communicate? I don't know your form; what are your goals? Oh, transcendence? You're going for transcendence in your music. Good. How do you achieve that? It takes four hours? Good. Can you do it in 20 minutes? Maybe not. You know, that's the beginning of a conversation. This is your goal; by the way, my goal is also transcendence; well, this is the way that we've done it in this way, and this is how you do it, and people have to know this, this, and that. Suddenly, the barriers are breaking down, because I know more about how you try and get to the same goal, and you know more about how...what...how I do it. CL: And when people ask you, as I'm sure they do, because they ask me everywhere: What about this clash of civilizations? The West against the rest, or...? YYM: What's great about art, I think, and what I love about music is that I think music can incorporate paradoxes and contradictions, the way you can't, sometimes, in very specific language, and I think what is really good about music, is that if...and if the goal is to create an empathetic imagination for people or places that are further away, or maybe very close to us, then our goal is to find the mechanism, and the vocabulary to create that empathetic imagination. Once you do that...once you know, and you can organically incorporate what someone else is thinking into your own, I promise you, you don't lose your identity; your identity only becomes richer. So, it's not about how necessarily, you know, global homogenization, or whatever, but rather, if I know more about you, and the way you think, it helps me in the way I think, and it helps my identity, and it is not a clash, but (you know what?), sometimes people are afraid. If I'm afraid of you; if I'm scared of what...the way you think, and I view that what you do is slightly dangerous to me, I might push you away. That act can be very destructive and harmful. And I think...so, we always...every individual has that choice. Is it going to be a clash? Am I going to push you away? Or am I going to try and learn something about you, by finding out how you think, which then can be helpful to me. And I think that my background as a liberal arts person in college...I think that definition...it's not about jobs, it's about trying to find a way to understand the world, and it's not about trying to say, okay, "but it ends with the Atlantic Ocean," and that's it. It's about understanding everything. You know, for two years I served as a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, and what that...the experience of hearing fabulous people talk about that work, I think has in many ways changed my way of thinking about my own work, and about the way I think of the world, because so much of the foundation's work had to do with places that I didn't go to, that I haven't been, so it forced me to really just think about the totality of the world, and I think, again, we need a new vocabulary to think about all of this, and I'm concerned with the cultural part of it, specifically in the musical part of it. CL: You refer somewhere to the Silk Road as the "Internet of antiquity," but I think of you as a kind of a great big piece of the Internet... YYM: Antiquity. (Laughter.) CL: ...and somewhat like it. I mean, you're a huge, larger-than-life neural network of a great slice of the world's music now, and you had it in you, and you can move in almost any direction. Somebody was saying to me you're something like Mahler or Brahms, you're such a student of the past, and yet poised towards the future, and you can go almost anywhere. You can make things a commercial success; you can make other musicians stars; you can cast...you can set the direction, and I wonder how you do it? How do you not only keep your coherence and your balance, but how do you choose where you want this whole complex of gifts - your own and allies - to go next? YYM: Well, I think you're way exaggerating all of this. I can tell you it's very simple: You stick to the knitting. I play the cello... [Music] YYM: ...and I do it through playing the cello and I do it not by saying that there is one cello sound, but that through an instrument...by doing something as well as I can, and going as deeply as I can, you can actually, then, enter into a lot of other worlds. And it's really through my background, my education, and my experiences, and the core is still my family. You know, somehow, that's the engine that keeps me going, and working with an unbelievably great team of people that all have different knowledge bases, but have agreed to work together. CL: It sounds like the Internet. It sounds like... YYM: It's what really is. Well, it's a human version of trying to look at the way the world is... [Music] YYM: ...and so that we actually have, in a way, a fellowship of somewhat like- minded people, that we realize that nobody knows everything, so the only way where you can actually have a glimpse of...you know, a real perspective on the world, is to actually, really find out about what each one of us knows, and if we then can agree on working towards something, we're that much richer for it. So, we're not producing products, and then that's it; but rather, there's a resonance that goes with it, and hopefully, you know, the goal is a kind of sustainability, and whatever we do, hopefully, is available to anybody else, because the invitation is: do likewise, and certainly do better, because then, we are building culture. We're using...well, what a friend used to say in science, that his work in molecular biology was building culture with one brick at a time. [Singing] YYM: I think of cultural bricks, that if you do something that's somehow interesting enough, and people can put their handle on, and say "this is okay," then someone can go on top of it, and build something else. CL: Listening to Yo-Yo Ma, you realize that inside the performer there's a pioneer and a maybe a shy sort of preacher. There are rich implications there about globalism: where the warriors are prepared to see conflict, he sees contradictions that the vocabulary of culture and music can embrace. They're thinking about war. He's thinking about a new renaissance. For me the core of that conversation is Yo-Yo Ma's invitation there to the passionate, the curious, and the generous to listen deeply and be prepared to take part in creating something new. Surely he wasn't speaking only to musicians. Please visit our global community online at www.thewholewideworld.net. The Whole Wide World is a collaboration of Lydon and McGrath Productions and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, in association with WGBH Radio Boston. We had help from producers Ben Walker, and Katherine Bidwell, from engineer Tom Tiger, and Jake Shapiro of the Public Radio Exchange. Jay Allison of transom.org, with support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is our radio visionary. Thanks also to Keith Kiya Wilson, Justin Grotelueschen, Kezia Parsons, Josh Ward, the Christian Science Publishing Society, and the public radio stations WCAI and WNAN on Cape Cod. Support for this program is made possible in part by the PRI Program Fund, whose contributors include the John. D. and Katherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Mary McGrath is our executive producer. I'm Christopher Lydon. Yo-Yo Ma/C. Lydon/p. 26 2 Yo-Yo Ma/C. Lydon/p. 13 2