When your heart and your mind are engaged, you cannot go wrong.
Passion is one great force that unleashes creativity, because if you're passionate about something, then you're more willing to take risks.
Nobody else can make the sound you make.
Music enhances the education of our children by helping them to make connections and broadening the depth with which they think and feel. If we are to hope for a society of culturally literate people, music must be a vital part of our children's education.
The worst thing you can do is say to yourself, "I want to be just like somebody else." You have to absorb knowledge from someone else, but ultimately you have to find your own voice.
When we enlarge our view of the world, we deepen our understanding of our own lives.
As you begin to realize that every different type of music, everybody's individual music, has its own rhythm, life, language and heritage, you realize how life changes, and you learn how to be more open and adaptive to what is around us.
I think one of the great things about being a musician is that you never stop learning.
Each day I move toward that which I do not understand. The result is a continuous accidental learning which constantly shapes my life.
Culture opens our hearts to one another. And the currency in culture is not money, but trust.
Sharing is a much better way to communicate than proving.
Music is one of the ways we can achieve a kind of shorthand to understand each other.
Bach takes you to a very quiet place within yourself, to the inner core, a place where you are calm and at peace.
I play an instrument that has four strings, and I'm still trying to get it right. What I've tried to do in the process of playing these four strings is to try and understand the people I meet, the stories they have to tell. And then become an advocate for them and their stories through music.
A Senegalese poet said 'In the end we will conserve only what we love. We love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.' We must learn about other cultures in order to understand, in order to love, and in order to preserve our common world heritage.
Perfection is not very communicative
When we have a good balance between thinking and feeling... our actions and lives are always the richer for it.
Classical music is one of the best things that ever happened to mankind. If you get introduced to it in the right way, it becomes your friend for life.
In performance, we have a greater purpose. The greater purpose is that we're communing together, and we want this moment to be really special for all of us. Because otherwise, why bother to have come at all? It's not about proving anything. It's about sharing something.
When you learn something from people, or from a culture, you accept it as a gift, and it is your lifelong commitment to preserve it and build on it.
I have yet to find something that beats the power of being in love, or the power of music at its most magical.
Our cultural strength has always been derived from our diversity of understanding and experience.
The role of the musician is to go from concept to full execution. Put another way, it's to go from understanding the content of something to really learning how to communicate it and make sure it's well-received and lives in somebody else.
But an innovation, to grow organically from within, has to be based on an intact tradition, so our idea is to bring together musicians who represent all these traditions, in workshops, festivals, and concerts, to see how we can connect with each other in music.
Good things happen when you meet strangers.
