Crowden School—the splendid middle school for young
musicians that I've written
about—invited me a month ago to observe a master class by Yo-Yo Ma. He had given a concert in Berkeley the
evening before, and was kind enough to contribute his time to Crowden. The entire student body was in
attendance to view his session with two quartets of players and a cello
soloist, all youngsters performing compositions by J. S. Bach. It was a delicious treat for the ears
and eyes.
The first quartet played their piece while Ma listened from
the audience. I felt it was a
lovely performance by those thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds, who must have
been overawed by the musical giant for whom they were playing. But after it, Ma went onto the stage to
engage the players in a conversation about what
they were thinking while playing one of the movements. After some tongue-tied moments by the students, the
ever-gentle Ma elicited from one of them that she thought of someone stomping
around on the deck of a swaying boat.
Ma liked that, and asked them to replay the movement with that image
in mind. As they did so, he
stomped and swayed in a circle around them, in time with the music. The result was such verve added to
their first performance, that the audience erupted in applause at the end.
Ma then asked the musicians, "Why are you
playing?" When one answered, "For
other people," Ma enthused, "Yes! You are communicating with people, sending your
understanding and emotions to them."
He insisted that each of them lock eyes with a member of the audience on
their next playing. When one
focused instead on her music sheets, he moved them away. He then sat next to a fourth-grade
student in the audience and pointed to that boy's eyes and his own. As the players looked into them, a
remarkable additional effervescence of spirit grew into the performance. "You must never forget that you
are communicating!" insisted Ma.
That theme of communication brought me back to my own thirty
years of teaching and lecturing. I
always sought to see deeply into the eyes of my listeners, to look for a spark
of understanding and a mind-to-mind connection. If I saw that spark, instead of a cataract of opacity, I knew I
was making contact, and my own performance became more exuberant. Meaning and understanding aren't simply spewed into a vacuum; they are directed toward others with gusto and
enhanced by a sense of the audience's response.
Next up was the cello soloist, not currently in the school,
but a 17-year-old studying at the associated Crowden Music Center. His piece included two movements of a
Bach cello suite. Here, Ma again concentrated
on the feeling of the music as a complement to its meter, and again he drew out
from the cellist more fire than in his already-impressive and
technically correct first performance.
Finally, Ma engaged in a dialog with the second quartet,
again younger students (including a ten-year old), about the occasion at which
their piece might be played. After
they decided that it might be for a wedding, he asked the players to immerse
themselves in their imagined atmosphere of that setting, to become participants
in the festivities, to add their feelings to those of the wedding party. As in the first two recitals, this
quartet's second performance gained a fuller body, which had been lacking in the first playing.
Ma's motifs of communication and feeling jibe exactly with
what I read about him in Jonah Lehrer's book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, which I discussed in a previous
posting. Lehrer reports on his
interviewing Ma about the source of the expressiveness in his
performances. "Perfection is
not very communicative," said Ma.
"If you are worried about not making a mistake, then you will
communicate nothing. You will have
missed the point of making music, which is to make people feel something. …
It's when I'm least conscious of what I'm doing, when I'm lost in the emotion
of the music, that I'm performing at my best."
(Detour into neuroscience: Lehrer goes on to discuss the neural processes that underlie
Ma's creativity, and that of jazz musicians when they jam. fMRI studies show that such performers
have learned how to suppress the activity of their dorsolateral prefrontal
cortex, the organ that restrains impulsiveness, in favor of their medial
prefrontal cortex, which is associated with self-expression. How they do this is not known. Ma retreats alone to a quiet room for a
half hour before each performance, from which he emerges relaxed, not clenched
up with an overbearing sense of focus that might straiten his playing—in other
words, ready to give free rein to his feelings.)
Back to Ma's master class.
What was so inspiring to me is how the 57-year-old Ma—an Olympian figure
to these youngsters who are more than 40 years his junior—could so quickly and
easily draw them to himself, have them lose what must have been their fright at
being in his presence. His
vibrancy, his tenderness, his ebullient humor, his ease at establishing rapport
had the players and the audience gripped for ninety minutes, as if in a
séance. The word
"master" is bandied about much too easily, but in this case it was
truly appropriate.