Yo-Yo Ma: Cellist in chief

"The way he treats a stagehand, it's exactly the way he would treat the queen of Holland," says Joseph Kalichstein, the pianist and artistic director of the Kennedy Center's Fortas Chamber Music Concerts.

"I realized late in life," Ma says, "that my twin passions are music and people. Maybe that's why I'm an odd person in this profession." The word "odd" is the closest Ma will come to acknowledging that he has special status in his field.

If you've ever seen him play, you know what he's like to talk to: In conversation, Ma offers the same sense of intimacy, ease and connection. Onstage, though, he's following the phrasing of the score; in person, words and thoughts tumble out of him, and phrases are left dangling in midair as his brain makes a new connection. Even in talking about the things that have shaped him as an artist and a person, which he has probably discussed often, there's a sense of discovery and freshness, as if he's formulating the thoughts for the first time.

The freshness, and the simultaneous focus on details and the whole, are equally characteristic of his playing. "We're taught to hold two different things in our head at the same time," he says. "You have to have the biggest picture, whatever that is: the era, or the vibes, or the universe or whatever, you know. And then you have to focus on the infinitesimal detail of the moment."

The common thread between playing and talking is communication, he says. "I may think something's important, but until you think it's important, it doesn't really matter what I do." As a result, he says, "I've got to know who you are."

'What a huge world'

Ma's worldview is in part the product of a liberal arts education. Studying at Harvard, rather than attending conservatory, meant expanding his view to extra-musical subjects (he's an avid student of anthropology) and developing, out of necessity, his ideas about communicating with a wider audience. "I may have been passionate about music," he says, "but people in my dorm were equally passionate about other things. So suddenly, it was like, oh, my gosh, what a huge world."

His instrument, too, contributed to turning him outward, by virtue of the relative narrowness of its repertory: a few concertos, a lot of chamber music. If you're a cellist, Ma says, "you play well with others. Because if you don't, you're not going to have much life." In other words, he has spent much of his life thinking about ways to reach people. His current stature may be a natural development of what from the start appears to have been an uncanny ability to get along with people.

Pianist Yefim Bronfman remembers encountering Ma at Marlboro when both were teenagers and Bronfman had just arrived in the United States from Israel. "He had such a personality that everybody on the bus was smiling," Bronfman says. "And he actually managed to make me understand what he's trying to say, although I [didn't] speak a word of English. He had that kind of personality."

But the scope of Ma's activities is also an outgrowth of a search for what he calls "playmates." They have included federal judge Mark Wolf, who met Ma on vacation, invited him to take part in a conference on theologian and Bach specialist Albert Schweitzer, and thus sowed the seed that grew into the multimedia, multigenre project "Inspired by Bach." The project was a not entirely successful series of films in which Ma worked with artists from other fields -- including a Kabuki actor and ice dancers Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean -- to reinterpret the Bach cello suites.

Another playmate is Tim Knowles, director of the Urban Education Institute at the University of Chicago. Over lunch one day, Knowles told Ma of a study that showed that six of 100 ninth-graders in Chicago's public schools graduate from college by the time they're 25. "I can't live in a country that -- and this is not just Chicago," Ma says, characteristically leaving his first thought half-finished. "I've been thinking about this ever since. What can I do? How can I be useful?"

One answer is emerging in a year-long pilot program that Ma's Silk Road Project is trying out in five New York City public schools, developed with the sixth-grade social studies curriculum.

A common note: Music

There's one thing Ma's endeavors have in common. As socially aware as they may be, or as political their dimensions, they're all about the music. Ma doesn't find causes and attach himself to them; rather, he follows what he already does to its utmost extreme. Music is "powered by ideas," he says. "And to understand that is huge, because then the ideas can galvanize people together, as opposed to . . . 'I have a better vibrato than you.' "