Blog #9: Yo Yo Ma Essay

This essay was written in 2014 by Yo-Yo Ma for the World Post. The site was created through a partnership between the Huffington Post and the Berggruen Institute on Governance. One thing I noticed about his bio is that he is an extremely accomplished musician and is clearly a genius. I also noticed that he decided to use his platform to write this essay and educate people because he knew he could reach a larger number of people.

My personal circumstances with reading this were that I did not know what it was about going in and that I kept an open mind while reading it. I also kept relating it back to the essay we just wrote in class about art and how impacts people. Many of Yo-Yo Ma’s claims were related to the claims made in Southan’s essay. My purpose for reading this text was to learn how we can better integrate art into the STEM ideals. Art and science go hand in hand and I am always open to learning about ways to make education better.

The rhetorical situation in this essay is integrating art and empathy into STEM. The scope is that we cannot reach our full intellectual and innovative potential if we do not emotions and reason into account. Yo-Yo Ma uses many unique words to strengthen his argument. The first word I chose to define is “empirically” which means originating in or based on. He uses this word to explain where emotion is based. The next two words are used in the same context. “Lewd” means, in this context, sexually unchaste. Finally, “lascivious” is a synonym meaning lustful. He used these words to describe why a certain dance was banned in Spain. In the larger context of the paragraph, he is using the dance as an example of how we all share ownership of art and music and that it “belongs to us all.”