The Friendship of Yo-Yo Ma, Richard Kogan, and Lynn Chang

♪♪ 50 years ago, three Harvard students got together to play some Schubert.

♪♪ You may not recognize him under all that hair, but this one is YoYo Ma.

At the time, this was one of the hottest new violin virtuosos.

Lynn Chang.

And this someone you may remember from our Schumann episode is Dr. Richard Kogan, who then was just Ricky.

Lynn, Ricky and YoYo formed a trio and a friendship that has lasted ever since.

And I wanted to know how they've done it.

♪♪ I wanted to learn more of the wisdom that they've learned from a lifetime of music and friendship.

♪♪ How many times have you played Schubert E-flat together?

It's not dozens.

It's...

It's hundreds of times.

I don't know.

Can you -- Can you tell?

Can you remember?

I don't know if we've reached triple digits, but we're high in the double digits.

[Laughs] I think.

So, you met YoYo first, and then you introduced Richard to YoYo.

Is that how worked?

Well, the three of the three of us were at the pre-college at Juilliard in high school, although we didn't know each other, we really got to know each other in college.

We resonated pretty immediately, quickly when we first started playing together, but and we resonated for a few reasons, we had... We each knew how to play our instruments and we were all incredibly unworldly.

We didn't know that much of anything.

Wouldn't you say, compared to most of our classmates?

We're amazingly unsophisticated.

I knew nothing compared to the two of you.

[Laughs] Did your lives go the way you expected each others life to go?

Not at all.

- Really?

Really?

Tell me about that.

I -- well, for the first 20 years of my life I thought I would be a doctor like my father.

We always knew that YoYo was going to be a cellist.

Or a musician.

Maybe he didn't.

It's funny, I don't often talk about this, but I was immersed in a musical family.

So there were certainly an expectation that I was going to go into music, and I guess I fell into it without ever making a conscious decision.

This is what I want to do.

So I think I spent the better part of my life until I was 49, actually thinking that maybe I should be doing something else.

And it was always in the back of my mind until the moment I realized that my deep passion was to actually was...

I remember as a five year old, just wanting to understand things.

Life was so confusing.

People were so confusing, Nature was so confusing.

And then I realized, you know, all the things that I was interested in, I could actually look at and study through the lens of music.

And then I was fine.

And after that it was fine.