New Additions to Yo-Yo Ma's Weeklong Residency We The People: Our Shared Past, Present, and Future at Tanglewood (August 1–9)

The Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) announces exciting new additions to We The People: Our Shared Past, Present, and Future, a weeklong residency curated by Yo-Yo Ma at the Tanglewood Festival featuring concerts, conversations, community gatherings, and educational events that offer a window into his perspective on the American experiment. As previously announced, We The People events take place from August 1 through 9 at Tanglewood and in the surrounding community and reflect on the American project and the role of music in civic life. 

Additions to An American Journey (Aug. 8)

Jon Batiste, an eight-time Grammy, Academy, and Emmy Award–winning singer, songwriter, composer, and pianist, joins the array of previously announced special guests appearing with Ma and the BSO on August 8. The “An American Journey with Yo-Yo Ma and Friends” program includes singer-songwriters James Taylor, Aoife O’Donovan, and Jennifer Kreisberg, historian Heather Cox Richardson, and Founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative Bryan Stevenson. Conductors Teddy Abrams and Ken-David Masur lead an eclectic program that combines music, history, civic ideas, and personal stories to explore the triumphs, tragedies, and human experiences that illuminate the enduring promise of America as a nation.  

Newly added to the “An American Journey” repertoire is Julia Wolfe's Liberty Bell, a 10-minute work for more than 100 musicians. Inspired by American cultural iconography including coins, postage stamps, songs, and poetry, Liberty Bell transforms familiar symbols into a clamorous, compact orchestral miniature reflecting on the meaning of liberty. The program also includes works by titans of American music including Bernstein, Copland, Foster, and Ives. Ma is soloist in the third movement of Dvořák's Cello Concerto with the BSO and performs in several of the other pieces. BSO violinist Bonnie Bewick joins O’Donovan in “Lakes of Ponchartrain.” Full program details for “An American Journey” are available here. (Aug. 8, 8 p.m.) 

New Event: We The People—Humanity in Practice (Aug. 5)

Tickets are now available for TLI Presents: We The People—Humanity in Practice, which places Ma in conversation with composer Brent Michael Davids, historian John Demos, singers Jennifer Kreisberg, Lauren Stevens, and Chris Newell, and storyteller and educator Roger Paul to share perspectives on how indigenous understandings of ecology, past, and present can help to situate the last 250 years in the context of the last 25,000 — and to reimagine the next 250. The group considers how our perspectives on the land and one another change when we center time differently and how we can put our humanity into practice to deepen our knowledge of our shared history and to understand ourselves as part of a much larger tapestry of meaning. More event details and tickets are available here. (Aug. 5, 6 p.m.) 

In His Own Words: Yo-Yo Ma on We The People

We are pleased to share a letter from Yo-Yo Ma describing his inspirations and ambitions for his We The People residency at Tanglewood. 

Dear friends, 

 

I am very excited to share this week with you at our beloved Tanglewood to celebrate We The People. As our nation marks 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, this is a chance to ask how we can draw on the wisdom of our past and present to create legitimate hope for the next 250 years — for our community, for our nation, and for our species. 

 

I am an immigrant. Ever since I came to the United States, I’ve struggled with a question: to what extent am I responsible for the country’s history, not just since my arrival from France as a seven year old, but the centuries and millennia of human experience on this land that came before? 

 

This week of concerts, conversations, and gatherings is my attempt to share some of what has helped me understand how we fit into the American experiment and what it means to belong — with one another, to our community, and on this land. We The People is a celebration of the ways that music can help us find sympathy with others through time and space, and of culture’s ability to turn the “other” into “us.” I hope that we will discover musical snapshots of our kaleidoscopic past, glimpses of truths that can help us navigate the complexities of our present and together choose a path towards a better future. 

 

43 years ago, Seiji Ozawa asked me to come to the Berkshires and coach young musicians at the Tanglewood Music Center. I was 28 years old. At Tanglewood, I was surrounded by the TMC Fellows, musicians younger than me, already with active minds, passions, and imaginations. It was thrilling to see their eyes light up in moments of discovery: hearing Leon Fleisher describe a rhythmic motif in a Brahms quintet as rowing a boat, for example, or experiencing the grandeur of architectural space by visualizing the progression of harmonies in a work as pillars in a gothic cathedral; learning that transcendence can be achieved by understanding the interplay of symmetry and asymmetry; discovering the role of patience in controlling dynamics through time.  

 

These moments create permanent memories that can change the course of a life, and it was witnessing them that helped me to understand music as serving something beyond the present, as part of an arc that began long before and reaches forever into the future. 

 

This week, the artists gathered at Tanglewood put into practice the lessons and wisdom that have been passed down to us. We apply them toward one another, toward our audiences, and toward our guests. We practice making music of the people, by the people, for the people — for each other and for the future.  

 

Serge Koussevitzky had a vision of Tanglewood as a place where musicians and audiences could immerse themselves in art and meaning, where wisdom could be passed on to a new generation, where we could ground a community in a particular place and look forward together. In 1940, in one of our darkest hours, he said “so long as culture and art exist, there is hope for humanity. … If there ever was a time to speak of music, it is now.” I hope that this week of music will inspire us to help each other imagine our country’s next 250 years and more. 

 

Warmly,   

Yo-Yo Ma