Grammy Winning Cellist Yo-Yo Ma Wife Jill Hornor Is An Art Consultant

Yo-Yo Ma wife Jill Hornor is a well-known Cambridge Art Consultant. Jill is also known to be a German Literature professor at Harvard.

Jill was born in New York City on October 2, 1953, but was raised in Connecticut. Like her husband, Jill also had an interest in music from an early age, though her instrument of choice was the violin. 

Her musical interest led to her joining the Greater Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra while studying at Mount Holyoke High School in Massachusetts. After graduating from high school, the future professor joined and started studying at Cornell University. She graduated with a degree in German literature.

Her love of German literature led her to Paris and several other European countries during her studies. She also studied at Yale University, and soon after graduating, Jil started working as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs.

Presently, Jill has busied herself with philanthropic works and is on the board of several charitable organizations. The most prominent of these organizations are the Silk Road Project, which her husband founded, and the New York Public Library.

She is also a talented homemaker as her husband has often described how well she raised their children alone due to his extensive touring. 

Yo-Yo married Jill two years after he graduated from Harvard University in 1978. The couple has been married for over 45 years. 

Ma met Jill during the summer of 1972. He had gone to the Marlboro Music festival because he had ties with the cellist and conductor Pablo Casals, with whom he'd performed regularly before joining Harvard. 

He met Jill during their first summer there while Jill was a sophomore at Mount Holyoke College. She was also the festival administrator. 

The cellist would end up spending four summers visiting the Marlboro Music Festival because of his attraction towards Jill. Between the summers, the two would engage in a long-distance relationship and keep in touch through messages and email.

Their relationship would end in marriage after Ma graduated from Harvard. Over the years, Ma has stated that in their close to 45 years of marriage, he has been busy touring for close to 27 years.

In an interview with People, the cellist talked about grateful he is to Jill for making sure their kids were loved and raised well during the time he was away. 

Yo-Yo Ma children with Jill are named Emily and Nicholas Ma. Nicholas was born in 1983 while Emily was born in 1985.

Due to their father's incessant touring, the children were raised primarily by their mother. However, this hasn't stopped them from having a great relationship with their father.

Since the pandemic caused touring to cease, Ma has stated that he has taken the opportunity to spend more time with his family.

Nicholas Ma

Yo-Yo's son Nicholas Ma is a well-known film director and producer. He is best known for producing the 2018 documentary, Won't You Be My Neighbor?

Nicholas attended Harvard University like his father and graduated in 2005. Soon after graduation, he worked with the global management firm Mckinsey & Company till 2013.

However, he went back to school in 2013 and achieved a Master of Fine Arts in 2017. Since then, he has been working on various film and documentary projects.

Emily Ma

Yo-Yo's son Emily Ma is also a Harvard graduate and is an associate at a New York law firm. The firm is called Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. 

She got married to John Mistovich on September 28, 2014, at Trinity Episcopal Church in Lenox, Massachusetts. John is the vice president at RBC Capital Markets.

Emily and John have two children together. Like her mother, she has also taken part in her father's philanthropic organization, the Silk Road Project.

Yo-Yo was born to Chinese parents Marina Lu and Hiao-Tsiun Ma in Paris France. Both his parents also come from musical backgrounds. 

The two migrated to France due to the Chinese Civil War and gave birth to Yo-Yo and his sister, Yeou-Cheng Ma while in the country. They would eventually move to New York City when Ma was seven years old. 

Marina Lu

Yo-Yo's mother Marina Lu was a singer and author. She dictated a book about her relationship with her son in 1995.

The book is called "My Son, Yo-Yo" and though dictated by the woman, it was written by Dr. John A. Rallo. In it, she details her son's developmental years alongside pictures from the family's album.

Hiao-Tsiun Ma

Yo-Yo's father, Hiao-Tsiun Ma was a composer, violinist, and professor of music. He taught music at Nanjing National Central Univesity.

A gifted scholar of music, Hiao-Tsiun received a doctorate in musicology from the prestigious French university, Sorbonne. There's also a legend that he once taught a dog how to hum.

Yo-Yo's sister, Yeou-Cheng Ma is also a musician and plays the violin and piano. However, she quit music to become a pediatrician. 

Yeou-Cheng, Yo-Yo's older sister, was born in 1952 in Paris, France. A prodigy like her brother, she was gifted in the violin while her brother was in the cello.

The two were homeschooled and the siblings would often challenge each other to play harder music. As the family lived under modest circumstances, music was their escape.

As an adult, Yeou-Cheng has sought to continue in the healing vein of music, especially for children, and is staunchly dedicated to the Children's Orchestra Society in New York.

A famous anecdote states that when she went into labor, she still continued teaching, rushing to the bathroom to take breaks when the pregnancy pangs got too sharp. The school was initially started by her father in 1962.

Sadly, as Yo-Yo was busy performing and Yeou-Cheng had her medical studies, it had blipped into the night, until the older sibling, with the help of her Filipino husband Michael Dadap, restarted it in 1984.