Doublestop Magazine

Yo-Yo Ma

New Yorker music critic Alex Ross (who is also the author of the The Rest Is Noise) recently interviewed Yo-Yo Ma, focusing on the Silk Road Project. Ma discusses the fluid concept of intonation:

Finally I started learning the Persian dastgah scale, where, if you started on D, the E-flat immediately sounds sharp. But with about an hour’s work any musician can acknowledge these as the desirable notes and the beautiful ones. You can quite easily get your ear inside a scale or mode. And then of course there are the different understandings of rhythm, falling in with West African grooves or with the amazing rhythms created by the tabla player Sandeep Das.