I am finally catching up on some of the podcasts that I usually follow. Yo-Yo Ma's interview with Krista Tippet on On Being is absolutely fantastic. Of course he is a genius and fascinating; to hear the whole podcast go here: podcast
I did want to share this snippet from the podcast, though. Ma asserts:
"Yeah. Good music. Look, or any type of music can be part of good music in the sense that — but I'm not even saying good music. I'm saying good musicians would be able to, you know, to compose, to improvise, to be virtuosic in what they do, and can easily absorb other influences and make it organically their own. So that, you know, new influences are embedded. So there's the process of constant growth. And then, finally, the last quality would be the musician that actually is able to transfer — to inject all of their knowledge and give it to somebody else so that they can actually look at the world and figure it out for themselves without the first musician being there — so it's a process of birth. It's a process of constant cultural rebirth."
I love this! I love that for Ma, mastery is not about merely replicating but it's about generating. In other words, to be educated means to be a person who takes new information, allows it to influence what you already know how to do and transmits that understanding to others. I would love, as a teacher, to aspire to the same.
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