What Is This, a Crossover Episode? by Andi Q. '25

During the first MIT Wind Ensemble (MITWE) rehearsal this semester, Fred Harris (the director of MITWE) was going through the semester’s important dates and logistics. It was all the typical stuff – CPW concert in April, no rehearsal on Presidents’ Day, etc. – until suddenly:

“There will also be no rehearsal on Wednesday, February 19. There will be a… special surprise… for us that day. I will say nothing more.”

I was very excited to hear this. Two years ago, Fred had also promised a “special surprise” that turned out to be a free week-long trip to the Amazon Rainforest over spring break. We got to perform in a bright pink opera house in the middle of the rainforest! But I was also a little suspicious. The most recent “special surprise” was a few days before classes started, when Fred informed the MITWE clarinets that we were scheduled to perform in the Sonic Jubilance concert in the second week of the semester. You never quite know what you’re getting into with Fred.

(In case you were wondering, the concert went great. Jeremy wrote a blog post about it yesterday that you should read.)

A week later, I received an email from the Music & Theater Arts (MTA) events office revealing the surprise. Jacob Collier (!) and Yo-Yo Ma (!!) were coming to MIT (!!!) to tape the pilot episode of some video-podcast-like series, and as an MTA student, I was invited to attend (!!!!). Talk about a crossover episode! It was very much the first kind of “special surprise” I was hoping for.

For context, Jacob Collier and Yo-Yo Ma are two incredibly talented, world-famous musicians:

• Jacob is a vocalist/songwriter/producer/ multi-instrumentalist⁠01 Wikipedia lists 12 different instruments he plays. /educator known for basically being a modern-day Mozart. That is to say, he’s an eccentric performer and a savant at everything music theory – even the complicated stuff like jazz. He has won 7 Grammys at just 30 years old and has almost 2 million subscribers on YouTube and TikTok.
• Yo-Yo is one of, if not the most well-known cellists ever. Ask anyone to name a cellist and they’ll probably name him. He has won 19 Grammys, and if you listen to classical music on the radio or Spotify, you’ve almost certainly heard his music. He even appeared on an episode of Arthur once, and if that’s not the peak of fame, I don’t know what is.

Now, I know what you’re probably thinking. If these two musicians are so amazing and famous, what are they doing at MIT – a science and engineering school? Well firstly, MIT has a top-tier music program, thank you very much. But secondly, Jacob and Yo-Yo have surprisingly deep affiliations, both personal and professional, with MIT:

• Jacob did his first-ever college artist residency at MIT in 2016, back when he was first going viral online. Fred was the person who led the effort for him to come to MIT! The residency ended in a massive concert with Jacob performing with over 150 MIT music students in Kresge Auditorium. MIT Video Productions made a documentary about that concert, which went on to win an Emmy⁠02 That's right – MIT Video Productions, which you probably know for posting MIT lecture videos on YouTube, has won several Emmys. . Before that residency, he had also worked closely with Ben Bloomberg, a PhD student at MIT’s Media Lab, to design equipment for his live performances.
• Yo-Yo lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And hey – that’s also where MIT lives! He has collaborated plenty of times with MIT MTA over the past few decades and is friends with several MIT professors. Not just the music professors, I must add – one time when LSC (MIT’s student-run cinema) was planning a special event sponsored by Professor Anantha Chandrakasan (dean of the school of engineering), he casually suggested inviting “[his] good friend Yo-Yo Ma” as the moderator for the Q&A at the end⁠03 Unfortunately, Yo-Yo was busy that day, so we had to settle for some Nobel Prize laureate instead. .

Admittedly, I wasn’t as big a Jacob Collier/Yo-Yo Ma fan as many of the other MIT students in attendance. I don’t listen to much cello music (I much prefer piano/clarinet music), and a lot of Jacob’s music is just a bit too avant-garde for me. Still, the taping was pretty incredible, and I am listening to a Yo-Yo Ma album on repeat as I write this post.

Unfortunately, we were strictly forbidden from filming or taking pictures during the taping, so I don’t have any pretty pictures or videos to show you. BUT! The production company did not (explicitly) ban pen and paper, so I sneakily wrote down notes the whole time.

There is definitely much to be desired in the quality of my notes, but in any case, here is my best approximation of what happened that evening:

(From here onward, I will omit the audience for clarity and also my own image editing sanity.)

In many of his performances, Jacob uses audience participation (usually through singing) as a tool to create music.

Then more opening remarks. Yo-Yo finally enters the concert hall after a brief introduction from Jacob. TL;DR: This event was meant to be a conversation between Jacob and Yo-Yo with audience participation sprinkled in between.

The fanboying back and forth went on for a solid five minutes.

I’m not joking, he actually said this pretty much verbatim.

The audience then spontaneously started whistling to imitate birds. It sounded like this but with people singing in the background and Jacob improvising fluttery chords on the piano. It felt rehearsed but wasn’t. (Fun fact: I never learned how to whistle before coming to MIT.)

Jacob and Yo-Yo were both child prodigies but were raised very differently. Suzie Collier, Jacob’s mother, always encouraged him to “be Jacob when [he] was a wee lad”. (He says “when I was wee lad” a lot because he’s British.)

(A four-octave vocal range is insane, by the way. Most people only have a three-octave range.)

They played the following two songs from Hush:

• Flight of the Bumblebee (that really fast song that you’d see videos of child prodigies playing on YouTube). “Wow, we went from the birds to the bees,” Yo-Yo joked after this performance.
• Stars (a song with 13 beats per measure, which is really unusual for most people but apparently completely normal for Jacob). Jacob started beatboxing in the middle of this one, which Bobby McFerrin did not do in the original album.

At this point, Yo-Yo decided to really lean into the “haha I am so old” part of his personality for some reason. He talked about how he met Bobby at Leonard Bernstein’s 70th birthday party (which was almost 40 years ago), before telling Jacob that he doesn’t know how the screen-record feature on iPhones works.

The audience member whose phone started ringing then hurriedly left out of embarrassment. Jacob wasn’t mocking them or anything though – you could tell he was totally prepared to start jamming out to the ringtone.

For a moment, I tuned out the conversation as I scribbled down notes on my paper. When I stopped writing, however, I was greeted by this new conversation:

Not sure what exactly led them here, but cool I guess.

A somewhat serious conversation ensued after this. Stuff about how rules are worth making so you can bend/break them (both in life and music). But then suddenly:

They played Gershwin’s Summertime for this jam session, with the audience choir singing chords in the background while Yo-Yo played the melody on his cello. Summertime is already a beautiful song by itself, so this was my highlight of the evening.

(Kind of ironic though, given how cold it was outside.)

At this point, we only had about ten minutes left, so there was some audience Q&A before the final jam session.

• Q: How can one overcome the barrier to entry for stuff like orchestral music?
• Yo-Yo: “Find someone who likes something and ask them to show you why they like it.”
• Q: What are you dreaming of that isn’t quite possible right now?
• Jacob: “A space for holding all the stuff we have in the world, and a space where we can all coexist and collaborate.”
• Q: Have you ever had some big idea where you don’t have the tools to execute it?
• Jacob: “Yeah, almost every project.” “… Life would be boring if everything was easy and possible.”

We ended the evening with the Dona Nobis Pacem canon – traditionally a short prayer for peace that ends a church service. What a fitting way to end an incredible evening!