Ana González: Would you describe yourself as an outdoorsman? 

Yo-Yo Ma: No. No, I'd like to pretend that I am. I have many fantasies of parachuting someplace and going, you know, fly fishing or rock climbing. But I, I'm not … is this being recorded? 

Ana González: Yes. 

Yo-Yo Ma: What is this? 

Ana González: Well, I want to know why are you making a podcast about being outside so much?

Yo-Yo Ma: Oh, that's a very good question. Well, first of all, it's what doesn't exist in my life that I know is missing. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Hi, I'm Ana González and this is Our Common Nature, a musical journey with Yo-Yo Ma through this complicated country to help us all find that connection to nature that so many of us are missing. We climb mountains, play music, play music, drive dirt roads, recite poetry, traverse rivers and oceans and our own brains –  all to figure out how to better live on our planet. Together.

Yo-Yo Ma: So, you think people get that? 

Ana González: Yes. 

Yo-Yo Ma: Really? 

Ana González: Yeah. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Okay, let’s get started. When you picture Yo-Yo Ma, he's probably indoors, in a suit, maybe even a tux, and he's playing a cello. He's probably playing this piece.

Yo-Yo Ma plays Bach

The Prelude from Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major. He's played it everywhere. In Baroque churches, in mountain forests, along streams, on rooftops, in large concert halls for the BBC and a tiny desk for NPR. He even played it in an episode of Arthur. 

DW: This is the best thing I've ever heard.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: And, on a sunny spring day, you might even catch him playing this piece in a national park somewhere, right after crawling on the ground in his khakis to take a photo with a baby named JoJo. 

Person: Can we have a pic? 

Yo-Yo Ma: Of course. Let's do this. 

Person: Oh, that is so cute. Jojo! 

Yo-Yo Ma: Jojo and Yo Yo.

Yo-Yo Ma: I play Bach Cello Suite No. 1 because it's the closest piece of music I play that reminds me of the infinitude of life.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: It’s also one of the first pieces of music he ever learned. When he was a little kid! And now he’s just celebrated his 70th birthday. Part of the Yo-Yo secret sauce is that he can make the leap from Bach to infinity. But what about those of us who aren’t you know, Yo-Yo Ma, and who have maybe never played Bach and aren’t really sure that they are pronouncing the name correctly? 

Well, I have spent the last few years trying to figure that out. Over the next 7 episodes, I will be travelling across these united states with Yo-Yo leading the way. As he plays music under the stars and deep down in caves, we’re going to explore the unbreakable connection between the art and the stories people create and the places that they’re from. From Appalachia, to Hawai‘i, to today, on the coast of Maine.

But before we get to that, back to Yo-Yo and that piece: BACH

What about this piece connects Yo-Yo to nature? Well, it goes back. Way back

Yo-Yo Ma: I used to get into trouble, I used to think it's really hard to start this flowy kind of thing. Because I'm starting from nothing, right? So it's like jump-starting a car. Blaaaaa. But what made it work for me is when I started thinking of an image of seeing the flow of water, and I join it. The piece has started long before I'm joining it. I use the energy of that flow that's happened before. Do do do do do has been happening forever. I'm welcomed into the flow.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: If you could zoom into Yo Yo's brain when he plays this piece, you'd see images appearing. First, the water, and then that transforms. 

Yo-Yo Ma: You start to see flying things. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Birds flying through sunbeams. 

Yo-Yo Ma: You'd look in the ground. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: You see roots and soil. 

Yo-Yo Ma: You go underwater 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Whales and coral reefs, bubbling through notes that are more than 300 years old. It's clear when I started talking to him that Yo-Yo uses nature to connect to music. And then he uses music to connect right back to nature.

Yo-Yo Ma: You know, the infinitude of life. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: And about two thirds of the way through the piece, all the music just stops.

Yo-Yo Ma: We don't like silence. And then it starts again. But differently. Oh. It starts to build up. It keeps going. It becomes more and more insistent. And the music gathers more and more energy. Where are we going? And finally we hit almost the beginning, but a different version of the beginning at a higher octave. It's higher energy and the piece ends.

What could all this mean? 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Yo-Yo has spent practically his entire life thinking about this piece, about the power it contains. He’s traveled the world playing it, sparking conversations on borders, in deserts, in ruins, and rivers, all because, for him, this piece represents how human beings have the ability to overcome anything if they just take a step back. 

Music

ANA GONZÁLEZ: And this is especially important today. When there seem to be more loud, conflicting opinions than ever before, with people kind of stuck in their own extreme bubbles. 

Yo-Yo Ma: We always had division, but family comes together when there's an emergency. 

Ana González: I notice you're saying we, like “we, as Americans.” Even though, you know, you were born in a different country and you immigrated here. Do you feel like you're an outsider to that division, or are you a part of it?  

Yo-Yo Ma: Well, you know, it really depends how, how you think about it. I arrived as an immigrant in 1962. So, do I just own part of the country starting from 1962? Am I responsible for slavery? For the removal of Native Americans? I think I am. Because if I am a citizen, I'm responsible for all of it.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: And so a a good place to start mending our relationships to each other is by asking: 

Yo-Yo Ma: What do we have in common?

MUSIC

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Big question, right? Let’s just take the United States. If you zoom out, everybody who lives here on this land has one thing in common: we’re living on this land. We have to learn how to live on it and amongst each other, despite division, disconnect, a really tough history, and an uncertain future. 

So, the thing Yo-Yo does best, the thing he’s most famous for, is connecting people through music. And now he’s taking that out into nature. He's dropping the endpin of his cello straight into the dirt, and he's inviting all of us to listen and help fold our lives back into nature and back to each other.

Yo-Yo Ma: I think the purpose of our common nature, if I've learned anything, is to reinforce the fact that we are part of nature. And if we acknowledge that, it means that whatever we do with, or to nature, allows us to live, to survive. 

BEAT

ANA GONZÁLEZ: So let’s back up.  Where do we even start? Yo-Yo started this musical road trip where everything begins: with a new day. 

Ana González: How can playing music connect us to a sunrise?

Yo-Yo Ma: Oh, so this should be a really quick question. Well, uh, both are forms of energy. One that actually allows for our ecosystem to exist. And the other is a system that we've developed that puts us in the necessary state of mind for us to function. You don't play a lullaby when you want an army to go march into war. Right? You don't do a drum set and loud percussion when you want a baby to sleep. It's something that we've invented and every culture has its own version of what works. 

Chris Newell: One of the things that we’re supposed to be doing is: as the sun, that first beam of light, when it finally peeks over the horizon, that’s when we’re supposed to be singing to welcome the sun. And that changes everything.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: That's Chris Newell. And he’s going to teach Yo-Yo how to play for the dawn, after the break.

BREAK

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Our Common Nature is back. I’m your host Ana González. And we’re on the coast of New England, where there’s a group of people who have a long-standing cultural tradition of using music to bring the sunrise each day. 

Chris Newell: And those were sacred times, especially as a young man, you know, the easiest thing to do was to just stay up all night, five o'clock, you know?

Ana González: Just easier to stay up. 

Chris Newell: Just stay up at the fire and sing and have a good time, and welcome the sun. It's an amazing thing to experience that and feel that force of creation. You know, that, that's really what it is. It's the closest thing I can say, or one of the ways that I connect with our creator. We don't imagine it as a singular person that's all powerful. It's rather more, uh, you know, all of the forces of nature. And a way to experience that is to experience in a sunrise.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Chris Newell grew up in Northern Maine 

Chris Newell:  I am a Passamoquoddy citizen born and raised in the community of Motahkmikuhk, which is known on English maps as Indian Township, Maine.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Passamaquoddy is one of the 5 Wabanaki nations that encompasses parts of present-day New England and Canada. Chris is an educator now, but he made most of his career touring different powwows as a singer and a drummer, a practice he learned from his community and dad. 

Chris Newell: My dad used to sing all the time. And one of the things my father did was preserve our language, so I was blessed to grow up with him always imbuing that in me.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Yo-Yo came to Chris because celebrating sunrises is a crucial part of his tribe’s spirituality and creation story. 

Chris Newell: We have the belief in a cultural hero named Glooscap. He fired arrows into the ash trees and from the ash tree came the first men and women who he called Wabanaki, which is “the people of the dawn.” 

MUSIC

Chris Newell: Glooscap said we have a duty as Wabanaki people to welcome the sun with music

MUSIC

Ana González: How would you describe that first, the dawn? What does it look like? What does it feel like?

Chris Newell: You know, it can get quiet at nighttime, but then you start to hear the bird life and everything start to rise just before. 

MUSIC

Chris Newell:  And then the colors,

SINGING

Chris Newell: That first beam of light, when it finally peaks over the horizon, that's when we're supposed to be singing to welcome the sun. Those first beams as they come upon us. And that changes everything. 

SINGING

Chris Newell: As soon as that first beam comes, it becomes so much brighter. The colors become so much more vibrant. And life, it kind of restarts. 

 Lauren Stevens: My name is Lauren Stevens. I'm Passamaquoddy from Motahkmikuhk.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Lauren is the voice you hear singing.

 Lauren Stevens:  When I sing, it's almost like I feel the power of those songs and they just come out. People make mention of, oh, that's so beautiful. And I'm like, “Yes. Because that's, that's our ancestors. Our ancestors held onto these traditions for thousands and thousands of years, despite not being recorded and despite not being able to practice them. So, to be able to hold onto some of them, and to be able to share them is a responsibility really.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Lauren is what she calls a traditional song keeper. She was given that role by elders who invited her to sing at gatherings. 

Lauren Stevens: Chris's dad. You know, he, every time he saw me, he acknowledged me by name, and he'd say, “Hey, come here doz.” And he'd usually have me sing

SINGING

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Lauren and Chris grew up together and still play music together. And one day, in the middle of the pandemic, when native reservations like the one that they grew up on were getting hit the hardest by COVID, they got a call from Yo-Yo.

Lauren Stevens:  And I remember Yo-Yo asking, you know, how can I help? What can we do? And I remember saying, we're already doing it. That visibility factor of indigenous people when we were supposed to be eradicated, ultimately we weren't supposed to be here. But we're here.To be able to collaborate, to be able to share our culture, in a space that is very visible.  

Chris Newell:  My suggestion was for him to experience playing his music as a sun rose.

BEAT

ANA GONZÁLEZ: And so, the plan was hatched: Yo-Yo would drive from his home in Massachusetts up the coast of New England, meet Chris and Lauren, and learn a new way of experiencing this land through music. Which meant learning a new way of playing. 

Chris Newell: Powwow music is so different from Western classical music. You really gotta be immersed in it to get it down. The drumbeat for a powwow song a straight powwow song is is, you know, kind of a straight beat like that [claps beat as powwow music joins it] But the song, the melody that we're singing over it is composed in triple or sometimes beats of five.  

Ana González: Oh!

Chris Newell: If you're somebody that's used to, you know, snapping your fingers on the downbeat, this is left footed as heck. You know, it really is. 

Archival powwow music

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Chris started looking through old tapes of pow-wow performances he’d done. And he found this recording

Archival powwow music

Of his old bandmate, Kenny, singing an original piece.

Kenny’s voice sings

Chris Newell: And listening to him sing it, I was like you know that melody and the way he’s singing it,I bet you could pull that off on a cello. I actually created a, um, kind of a how to video. I felt silly doing it. I was like, “Man, I'm making this for Yo-Yo Ma.” And I was like, I don't know if he'll actually go for it. But then when we met to rehearse he asked me the story and I told him

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Kenny was a good friend, like a brother to Chris, who died a few years ago.

Chris Newell: It would be beautiful to see my brother's song this way. And that’s how it ended up happening.

AMBI of arrival

Yo-Yo Ma: Boss, tell us what to do.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: So, Yo-Yo arrived at Acadia National Park on a chilly June night in 2021. He met Chris in person for the first time, who was there with his parents.

Yo-Yo Ma: I'll never forget that I met Chris's father, and he was cold, and I was able to just have some words with him.

Chris Newell: Because it was a little chilly where we were rehearsing, he actually brought a blanket from his room. and put it on my dad. That's how they met each other.

Yo-Yo Ma: Which was so comforting to talk to such a beloved elder. 

Chris Newell: And my father at the time was nine years into being treated for multiple myeloma.  

ANA GONZÁLEZ: A rare blood cancer

Chris Newell:  His body was in kind of rough shape, but, when they met, it was like two human beings that really saw the humanity in each other. It was like two old buddies that came together. After the dinner, they sat and talked and talked and talked, just having the greatest time.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: And everybody went to sleep that night, not exactly knowing how the morning would go, if Yo-Yo would be able to pull off an entirely new musical style with folks he just met that night. But they set their alarms extremely early. And after the break, we’ll hear what happens at sunrise.

BREAK

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Our Common Nature is back, and we are on the coast of Maine just before dawn walking out into a field. 

Lauren Stevens: I remember that morning it was like kind of cold. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: That’s Lauren Stevens again

Lauren Stevens: There were a lot of bugs. They were happy, I'm sure 'cause they were getting fed. And while the ocean is very much present and close, it felt secluded, like we just had our own little bubble right there.

Chris Newell: (FADEOUT) Wabanaki greeting. Good morning everybody.  As part of Wabanaki people, our existence is to sing the sunrise up in the morning. For us as Wabanaki people, we understand our meaning of life. We are meant to do this. We are meant to start the day. We are meant to reside in our homelands here in Ckuwaponahkik, in the land of the dawn forever. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Chris and Lauren are standing in the middle of a field with a few other performers. Another singer, a storyteller, a flautist. Audience members surround them in folding chairs. Beams of light begin to pull over the trees. 

Lauren Stevens: I knew it was important to perform the “Welcome Song” . That song is important for every time we gather or every time there were visiting tribes, as that welcome, as that kind of starting point.

Music

Lauren Stevens: This was the first time I had ever heard our traditional music  with a non-traditional instrument, And to hear the welcome song played by Yo-Yo on the cello, it resonated internally, like I could feel it in my body.   It vibrated my soul.

MUSIC 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Chris and Lauren walked to the side and left Yo-Yo to play by himself. He continued playing through the entire suite, movement after movement. Something he’s so used to doing. But then, Chris joined him on the drum. And then, they began to play that powwow song that Kenny recorded into Chris’s cassette player more than 20 years ago.

MUSIC

Ana González: That was like a really vulnerable thing that you did. As Yo-Yo Ma to be like learning music in front of people. Did it feel that way to you?  

Yo-Yo Ma: No, well, well you know what I think, right? I truly want to live my life where I'm a human being first, a musician second, and a cellist third. And what you just said involves thinking that I'm someone of note because I play the cello well. But actually I'm a human being first. So I'm the five year old playing with another five year old in the sandbox. 

Song ends

SPEAKER: Woo. Aho! Yes! The first powwow cello.

SPEAKER 2: Ahhh, I love it!  

ANA GONZÁLEZ: This was not a traditional sunrise ceremony. Those aren’t allowed to be recorded. But this performance was a moment of collaboration across cultures in the presence of dawning day in the middle of a pandemic. At a time when people were so separated, it was scary to walk past people on the sidewalks. Remember that? And here were musicians from super different places playing together, being kids in a sandbox together.  

Chris Newell: It was a moment of transformation. You can transfer that energy onto people. You really can, through music. In my experience, that happens in the powwow world a lot. You sing just the right songs for a dancer, and they just get into it, and all of a sudden, they get it. That energy comes through, and everything is working right, and they nail it. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: After the performance, there was a talking circle, a place for everyone in attendance to share what they thought, how they felt. Like Hawk Henries, a flautist from the Nipmuc people who also performed. 

Hawk Henries: My hope is that as we listen to the sound of our songs that we remind ourselves of the songs of bird and insect and tree and water. And those songs bring us joy. And they have the capability of allowing us to see the common thread that weaves its way through all of us. 

Deb Haaland: Thank you to the Wabanaki people for bringing the sun to me every day of the 60 years I have been alive. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Local and national leaders spoke

Deb Haaland: Deb Haaland, very honored to serve this country as the Secretary of the Interior

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Yo-Yo spoke.  

Yo-Yo Ma: So this has been extraordinary. I'm left with two words that I'm thinking a lot about, and they're hope and gratitude.  A lot of you spoke of both of these words….

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Chris’s dad, Wayne, made make his way to the performanc,e and he offered a prayer. 

Wayne Newell: Good morning. Tan kahk. If you can please stand. You'll notice I'm not.  Let's get into a, a prayful mood. 

PASSAMAQUODDY

Dear Creator, we thank you for life for another day. We thank you for our sleep. We hope that each one of us had dreams that we can work on, dreams that we can understand, eventually. If we don't, dreams that we can ask other people for. 

We thank you for gathering here today. All of us. We thank you for our grandfathers and our grandmothers, and most of all, our children. They are our future. Let us hope that we can teach them well. 

We thank you for all that is past, regardless of how that past was. It is a past.  We thank you for today. We thank you for the future. None of us have an idea what that will be. But this gathering certainly strengthened the hope that that future will be a good one together. 

BEAT

Yo-Yo Ma: It starts with caring. And because we went there, we met people, we made a relationship, you don't break it. That honor is being human.

 Ana González: How do you see sunrises now?

Yo-Yo Ma: Do you know, I actually think of gratitude when I see the sun, that I'm part of the solar system, and that there's magic to it and there's a miracle to it.

MUSIC

ANA GONZÁLEZ: And Yo-Yo is committed to making more and more of these relationships through Our Common Nature. And that means more performances with more people who have special connections to this land, from underground time capsules 

JERRY BRANSFORD: Finding their name on the cave walls, walking in the footsteps, and just feeling the power 

To glaciers 

Ana Gonzalez: And it just looks like a river frozen in time

From forests 

LAVITA HILL: The Cherokee people have always known of this mountain.  

To coal mines. 

CHRIS SAUNDERS: This is the kiss my butt curve 

From the deck of ships in the Pacific ocean 

SNOWBIRD BENTO: Feeding sharks by hand, chanting to them and they swim in.

To the coast of the Atlantic and beyond. 

Yo-Yo Ma: And the fact that with these different backgrounds we can talk and agree on things, we're going to actually learn about what people know there. Because we realize, my goodness, had we not done those things, our concept of the world would be a slightly smaller and slightly poorer world. That is, for me, the purpose of art. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Next time, we go to the longest cave system in the world that just so happens to be in Kentucky, to hear a symphony explore the underworld.

Our Common Nature is a production of WNYC and Sound Postings 

 

Hosted by me, Ana González.

Produced by Alan Goffinski

With editing from Pearl Marvell.

Sound design and episode music by Alan Goffinski.

Mixed by Joe Plourdel

Fact-checking by Ena Alvarado.

Our Executive Producers are Emily Botein, Ben Mandelkern, Sophie Shackleton and Jonathan Bays.

 

Our advisors are Mira Burt-Wintonick, Kamaka Dias, Kelley Libbey, and Chris Newell.

 

Additional audio provided by the Upstander Project. They are a film, storytelling, and educational company doing amazing work. They are actually the reason Chris and Yo-Yo even met. You can learn more about them by going to upstanderproject.org.  And if you want to watch the film their Reciprocity Project team made about Yo-Yo's visit to Acadia, you can find it in our show notes.

 

Special thanks to Acadia National Park. 

 

And if you want to listen to more music from this series, you can check out the Our Common Nature EP, featuring Yo-Yo playing with Eric Mingus, Jen Kreisberg and an Icelandic choir, now available on all streaming platforms.

 

This podcast was inspired by a project of the same name, conceived by Yo-Yo Ma and Sound Postings, with creative direction by Sophie Shackleton, in collaboration with partners all over the world.

 

Our Common Nature is made possible with support from Emerson Collective and Tambourine Philanthropies.

 

This episode is dedicated to the memory of Wayne Newell, Chris’s dad. Who, just a few months after we left Maine, died. 

Chris Newell: Yo-Yo actually sent us, um, uh, a tribute video for him, which we were able to play the audio for, for his funeral. That was special. I mean, the gift of music is, is unreal. To have a gift from Yo-Yo for him, specifically. And we keep it private, you know, it's for us.  Like Yo Yo was like, no, we're not sending flowers. Hold on. You know?