CHICAGO — What is an orchestral musician’s job?
Simply to play music? To show up in glamorous concert halls, give the best performances humanly possible, then pack up and go home?
Or is it something more than that?
To cellist Yo-Yo Ma, what happens in gilded venues such as Orchestra Hall, home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, is but one facet of what a classical musician can do. The rest occurs beyond the spotlight, when musicians venture out into neighborhoods and try to change the world.
That’s what Ma and young colleagues have done during his decade-long tenure as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s creative consultant, which ended last June. But his work in that role, most notably via multifaceted collaborations with the Civic Orchestra (the CSO’s training ensemble), will return to prominence on March 1, when he solos with the Civic in Dvorak’s Cello Concerto.
That concert not only will mark the centennial of the orchestra, which CSO music director Frederick Stock founded in the 1919-20 season, but will remind Chicagoans of how Ma has tried to influence a generation of young musicians. For when Ma wasn’t performing alongside the Civic Orchestra in Orchestra Hall or Millennium Park, he was visiting Chicago Public Schools, giving “Concerts for Peace” at St. Sabina Church, helping design a Once Upon a Symphony concert series for ages 3 to 5 and inspiring Civic musicians to bring their art to correctional facilities, homeless shelters, violence-plagued Chicago neighborhoods and other places where they’re desperately needed.
The idea has been to persuade gifted young musicians to think beyond the rigors of their instruments and the lure of the limelight. To envision how their music can change people’s lives.
“The reason that we do any of this, that we create new disciplines of thinking, of speaking — it’s for service,” says Ma.
“So the idea is not: Create a project, take it or leave it. No, we’re doing this in order to serve.”
The question is whether Ma’s zeal for using music to serve society — and to address its many ills — has compelled the Civic Orchestra musicians to do likewise on their own.
The best indications come from the young artists themselves, particularly those who have become Civic Fellows, a program launched in 2013 to propel them into “teaching, community engagement and program planning,” according to the orchestra.
“Last year I got to perform with Yo-Yo Ma in Unity Park in North Lawndale — I was to perform on a flute made out of a rifle,” remembers flutist Alexandria Hoffman, a Civic Fellow.
“Pedro Reyes is an artist who has this project where he takes guns from violent cities and melts them down into those shovels and uses these shovels to plant trees.
“Some of the guns were also melted down into instruments, including the flute that I performed on. We played Bach’s ‘Air on the G String.’ It was really kind of surreal. … It made me question where had this gun been and a lot of things.”
And it changed Hoffman’s view of the city in which she lives.
“I never would have gone to North Lawndale if not for this experience,” says Hoffman.
“The people there were saying: ‘Come out here. This is a neighborhood like any neighborhood.’
“My parents and I walked around North Lawndale and really enjoyed ourselves. It was really a kind of unity that Yo-Yo Ma was able to create in a part of the city that some people might never go to.”
The experience forced Hoffman to reevaluate what Chicago is about — and how the world perceives it.
“Chicago has this reputation for being a violent city (to) people who don’t live here,” says Hoffman. “It’s very frustrating as a native Chicagoan. You want to tell them: It’s a safe city. There are pockets like this. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go to these places.”
Violist Helen Hess was in the first wave of Civic Fellows, in 2013, and similarly found that the experience coaxed her out of complacency.
“I think being in all of those circumstances, which I was not always entirely comfortable with, has helped me continue to put myself in those kinds of situations,” says Hess, who was the Civic’s principal viola and now is in the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.
“The visit to the correctional facility that we made … it was the first time I’d been anywhere like that. I’d never interacted with kids in that situation. It opens your eyes to things you might never have been exposed to.
“And you realized: Kids are kids, in a lot of ways. They were enthusiastic about what we were doing. … It’s taught me even more how to find a sense of ease and comfort, how to relate to different kinds of people, to find the common ground and interact with them.”
Cellist Ma has long been a believer in trying to enlighten musicians and bring people together through such activities. His work as a United Nations Messenger of Peace, his role as artistic director of the annual Youth Music Culture Guangdong (China) festival and the training programs offered by his Silkroad project are just a few examples of how he has done so.
But he also feels his Civic collaborations and CSO work have been as much about learning as teaching.
“They’ve been an unbelievable education in terms of getting to know an organization much more deeply — the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association and (its) Negaunee Music Institute — and seeing the inner workings of a great cultural institution,” he says.
“And getting to know a great city and its workings. Visiting neighborhoods from Pilsen to other places, then working very happily within the (Chicago) Public Schools system and getting to know and seeing what was accomplished during that time.”
The idea, adds Ma, was to figure out “what we can do that fulfills a not yet necessarily expressed need in society. One of the things that I think people are very proud of is (the Civic) started doing a Bach Marathon project every fall leading into the holiday season, where they play all six Brandenburg Concertos.
“They learn to play rehearsals and perform by themselves, and then take it into a community … in the schools. They go to Theaster Gates’ venues on the South Side and also work at St. Sabina’s, doing these peace concerts.
“Just really getting to know our city.”
Whether such efforts have lasting value after the last note has sounded and the musicians have gone home is open to debate. Ma concedes that the results are not easily measured, but he contends that’s precisely the point.
“If you’re in any kind of education sphere, what we do is not pick low-hanging fruit and say: ‘Here’s the transaction, here’s what you got from me,’” he observes.
“It’s more like: Here’s ideas, here are some ways of thinking about things. And as you go through life, you might be revisiting these questions at different times and find the answers that suit the period of life that you’re in.
“I’m hoping that the job of someone like me is to actually plant seeds. And when those seeds start to be sown and take root and blossom and flower, it’s according to the individual and the environment they are in.
“Any parent prepares a child to meet the world that the parent is not going to see,” adds Ma. “That’s why I call this a nontransactional process. Whatever the results, I may not live to see, but hopefully they will bear fruit at some point.”
Why go to all this effort?
“I think that it’s very important, at a difficult moment in the world, where there a lot of fractures, that we actually listen to the people who are going to inherit the planet and give them space to make decisions. So people of my generation are not accused of handing over a world that’s broken.”
So it may be many years before anyone can accurately assess whether Ma’s efforts have made lives better. But he’s sure of one thing: Though his official role with CSO and Civic has ended, his work with these institutions is not done.
“I want to say that I may be ending a specific term, but I keep saying to people: Unless they know something I don’t know … I’m not going anywhere,” says Ma.
“What I love about culture that’s unlike a transaction is that it’s never over. You start a relationship, and you never end it. Because otherwise it’s not culture.
“So we’ll be working together for a long, long time to come.”
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