Why Yo-Yo Ma Thinks Culture and Music Can Help Protect The Planet
Ma believes that culture—which he defines broadly as the place where the arts, sciences, and society converge, can help assuage discord, strengthen community bonds, promote social justice, and protect the planet. In 2018, the cellist embarked on the Bach Project, an ambitious journey that uses culture as a bridge to connect with communities, launch conversations, and spotlight efforts that strive to do good.
For Yo-Yo, Bach’s 300-hundred-year-old music is one extraordinary example of how culture connects us and can help us to imagine and build a better future, but he believes there are many, many more. And for Yo-Yo, culture includes not just the arts, but everything that helps us to understand our environment, each other, and ourselves, from music and literature to science and food.
The Bach Project explores and celebrates all the ways that culture makes us stronger as individuals, as communities, as a society, and as a planet.
Yo-Yo Ma has also recently aligned with the SeaChange Project. The SeaChange Project advocates for “healing of our planet by connecting people to nature” through our “community of scientists, storytellers, journalists, and filmmakers who are dedicated to the wild.”
Ma likens these cross-cultural alliances to the “edge effect” in ecology, which occurs at the border where two different habitats intersect, like the forest and the savanna. There, certain kinds of biological diversity and life-forms thrive. In Ma’s world, edges are where creativity flourishes—and the Bach Project seeks them out.
Ma equates the Bach Project with the classic children’s tale about villagers who contribute cabbages, carrots, potatoes, and beef to a pot filled with boiling water and a stone. “It’s my version of Stone Soup,” Ma told me. “I play the cello. This is the best of what I can bring to you. What would you like to put in the pot? How would you like to start a conversation? What are things you’re thinking about? What are your needs—what is it that you’re struggling with?”
Read his article at National Geographic (subscription required) or view PDF here.
Our Common Nature: The Podcast
In this seven episode podcast series, Yo Yo travels around the United States to make music and meet people who have deep connections to the earth. Host Ana González joins him to uncover stories of the ways that culture binds us to nature, from Maine to Appalachia and Hawaii.
