A letter from Yo-Yo Ma

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 7-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 toward a better future. 

Forty-three 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