Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
Connecting Yo-Yo Ma with engineers in a Manhattan recording studio last week.

By SETH SCHIESEL

Published: September 30, 2004

ONE day in 1964, Hiao-Tsiun Ma, a musician recently immigrated from Paris, came home to his family's Manhattan apartment with an exotic find: a tape recorder by Norelco using a brand-new technology called the cassette.

There was always music in the Ma household: radio, records and, not least, the cello played by the only son, 9-year-old Yo-Yo. But until then, there was no easy way for the prodigy to listen to himself after playing.

Within a few years, he was regularly recording his rehearsals and performances. Listening and studying those primitive tapes improved his facility and tone. But more broadly, they fostered his regard for audiences and his sheer ability to communicate through music.

"The cassette tape recorder came in and that was a big thing, you know, a portable kind of device that actually might be able to record things in live situations,'' he recalled backstage last month at the Tanglewood Music Center in Lenox, Mass. "I have to say that I've learned that so much of what makes an acoustic performer do well is how well they know the spaces that they work in.

"Now, the thing that is really hard to do, that I think may be one of the hardest things to do, is to be in one place and somewhere else at the same time, which means to be empathetic to another space other than your own. What I learned from hearing recordings from, let's say, a mike that was placed at 20 feet versus 60 feet away is it makes the tempo sound different. It makes what you think may have been the right speed to do something - it may be wrong by the time you go 60 feet away. You can only really know that when there's evidence. And a tape recorder actually gives you that evidence.''

Childhood tape recorders may seem like a mundanity in the life of a renowned musician. But for Mr. Ma, who turns 49 next week, they were an early step in a life's journey defined by innovation. Along the way he has not only broken down musical barriers but also embraced the latest technologies to forge connections across barriers of time, geography and culture - even if he can't always find the charger for his iPod.

Learning early lessons by hearing himself from the audience's perspective presaged his entire career.

"There's just the physical ability to play the instrument; there's just no one better and probably no one as good,'' said Emanuel Ax, the pianist, who has been close friends with Mr. Ma since the early 1970's. "But one of the things that really distinguishes him from a lot of performers is that he really feels a connection with the audience and audiences are very important to him. You see people who are fantastic communicators, but they may not be at the very top of musical ability. And you see great players who are maybe kind of withdrawn and they commune with the music and the audience is welcome to watch, but they're not as interested in communicating and being performers, as it were. And then you have Yo-Yo.''

So much was clear under the big top of Tanglewood's Koussevitzky Music Shed one Saturday evening last month. That Mr. Ma was the featured soloist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra was traditional enough. But hanging over the musicians was a huge video screen, with smaller monitors flanking the stage, all operated by a technician with a Macintosh laptop computer sitting behind the percussion section.

They were there for "The Map,'' a 2003 piece by Tan Dun that is described as a concerto for cello, video and orchestra. Over the last two months, Mr. Ma has spent most of his time with the Silk Road Project, a multidisciplinary collection of performing artists that he founded to connect the classical tradition of the West with the diverse Middle Eastern and Asian musical cultures along the historical caravan route.

To create "The Map,'' Mr. Tan, the Chinese composer and conductor, journeyed through his native Hunan, videotaping traditional musicians. Those clips, digitized on the Macintosh, were "played'' at Tanglewood along with the orchestra by Joseph Miller, the video technician.

One of the most powerful moments of the piece has Mr. Ma playing in a sort of call-and-response with a soaring female singer on the video. Mr. Ma has played along with recordings in other projects, most notably with the "ghost'' of the tango master Astor Piazzolla.

For Mr. Ma, such collaborations are no less vital than playing with a live person. In fact, the recordings become a lens across space and time through which otherwise impossible connections can be formed.

When Mr. Ma was learning the classical cello repertoire, he tried to absorb the personal dynamics of composers - "who wrote it and why,'' as he put it. In the same way, Mr. Ma tries to use such a video or audio recording as a window into the soul of the person on the other side of the 1's and 0's. For him, that is the only way to create a true musical experience.

"I sort of worked with that video, kind of getting a sense so that no matter what happens, I sort of know when she's going to come in. I can get a sense of where her psychic dynamic is,'' he said. "You know that painting of God and Adam - you have, like, that finger. Technology made that moment really special, even though I've never met her. She's never met me. But we know of each other.''

As put by Mr. Tan: "The fantasy of Yo-Yo and I is that 500 years from now a symphony orchestra and cellist will play with this girl and they will have exactly the same feeling as we do today, across language, time, culture, place. The technology makes that possible.''

When he was a teenager studying at Juilliard, Mr. Ma graduated from cassette players. "I remember fooling around with reel-to-reel tape recorders, which was really interesting because you can play it forwards, you can splice it, you can do all kinds of things,'' he said. "That was kind of interesting in terms of not only sort of analyzing your own work but actually being able to hear distorted sound.''

Mr. Ma is certainly no techie, yet his comfort with the latest tools continues to reinforce his regard for the audience - in a concert hall or in a living room thousands of miles away.

Last week, Mr. Ma and musicians of the Silk Road Project recorded new material in Manhattan. Between takes on Thursday, the studio's Star Trek-like control booth bloomed with a mixture of Chinese, English and Japanese. Amid the gaggle, Mr. Ma could be found leaning in close to Steven Epstein, the producer, discussing elements of the music so subtle as to be recognizable to only the most sophisticated experts.

"One of the things that makes Yo-Yo so special is his appreciation for the recording process,'' Mr. Epstein said. "He's always willing to explore the range of possibilities that are inherent in the latest technologies so that his musical intentions are captured as accurately as possible.'' In fact, Mr. Epstein said, when he worked with Sony on the latest version of digital recording technology a few years ago, he conducted one of the early tests with Mr. Ma.

This week, Sony released Mr. Ma's latest album, "Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone," a collaboration with the Italian composer whose film work includes "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly'' and "The Untouchables.'' The project will later include a hybrid CD-DVD incorporating short films by University of Southern California students inspired by Mr. Ma's and Mr. Morricone's reinventions.

Now, even beyond "The Map,'' Mr. Ma is encouraging the Silk Road Project to use modern technology to make obscure cultural traditions accessible to Western audiences. It was typical of the group's approach that when members of the project spent two weeks in residence at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., earlier this year, the group included Kojiro Umezaki, who plays the Japanese flute called the shakuhachi and is an instructor in music and new media at McGill University in Montreal.

Along with Shane Shanahan, an American percussionist, and Wu Man, a master of the pipa, an upright Chinese lute, Mr. Umezaki came across an 18th-century Chinese scroll that depicted an Imperial voyage to China's south. Because the scroll is about 30 feet long, it can never all be displayed at once.

Inspired, the group not only wrote a 30-minute musical piece but also digitized important sections of the scroll. At a performance at Carnegie Hall this month, those images were displayed in motion and in harmony with the music. The spell was broken only when the big letters "DVD'' inadvertently appeared on the screen at the end, prompting knowing laughter from the audience.

Also at Carnegie Hall, Mr. Ma's group gave the American debut of a new video and music collaboration with Rysbek Jumabaev, a master of what is known as Manas, the epic oral poem of the Kyrgyz people.

But just as technology can help preserve the world's musical and cultural heritage and make it relevant to modern audiences, Mr. Ma remains aware of technology's potential to dislocate, upend and homogenize cultures. When he says, "In Ulan Bator, pop music is really big,'' it is with equal parts wonder and wistfulness.

Of course, globalization has its everyday benefits. "Well, what's so great is that my cellphone worked in Kyrgyzstan,'' he said. Mr. Ma rarely uses a computer; most of his e-mail is printed out for him. (He also joked that he isn't allowed to carry a laptop because he is known to lose things.) But the cellphone is his real lifeline.

"If he could implant a phone in his ear I think he would do it,'' Mr. Ax said, laughing. "He loves the idea that he can call now from anywhere. Like coming in from the airport he can call 15 people instead of just sitting there.''

Mr. Ma is a huge fan of the satellite television broadcasts he picks up overseas, but does not know the cable television provider at his home in Cambridge, Mass. The reel-to-reel players are gone. Now, he loves his iPod but confessed last month, "I can't find the charger.'' (Two weeks ago he said he had found out from his daughter where the charger was, but hadn't gotten his hands on it.)

Ultimately, however, Mr. Ma hopes that music and the technology through which it is created and spread can help make the world a bit healthier. For him, using modern technology to create musical and cultural connections is about spreading one simple message: "We've got to emotionally feel interdependent. Not codependent in the negative sense, but interdependent in the sense that everybody has strengths.''

"We actually do have to live in one world,'' he added, "and all of this technology is making it more essential that we have a way of thinking about a whole because we know that the alternative is disaster, is total, utter disaster.''

A periodic look at technology's impact on the work (and play) of leaders in many fields.