And that’s just during the rehearsal for his performance in Azul: The Soul of Argentina with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Wait until the real show begins.

When he’s done practicing, Ma reveals that it was a decidedly nonmusical occurrence in his life that ended up inspiring most of his ambitions and kept alive the fire that led him well past the pressures and occasional failings of child prodigies. He is funny and engaging -- almost impish -- but also very philosophical and more willing to impart the big picture than he is to chitchat about the number of cellos he owns ( just a few) or the languages he speaks (three).

“Anthropology became a world-changing experience for me,” he says. “It opened me up to a much bigger stretch of humanity that I really didn’t have access to or direct experience with.” This happened at Harvard University in the 1970s, when Ma, at age 17, decided to pursue a liberal-arts education, having studied music at Juilliard’s Pre-College Division. His wife is a former Harvard instructor, and together they have two grown children.

Born in Paris after his parents emigrated from China in the 1940s, Ma first learned music from his father (who had a PhD in musicology), although he didn’t pick up the cello until age four. “It’s just something I happened to be good at or had a facility for at an early age, and there’s no kid who doesn’t want to be good at something. I liked music, but it wasn’t ‘Be a musician or bust.’ [First,] I played violin, but apparently I wasn’t very good at it. I wanted to play double bass because I thought it was huge. I can give you every rationalization of why the cello. It’s a really nice instrument. It mirrors the ranges of the human voice, for example. But because I started so young, I didn’t have to make the decision like, ‘This is what I must do.’ ”

When he contemplates his career and the sheer scope of the boxed set, Ma goes straight to the heart of it: “It’s all fairly organic. In every chapter of my life, there were different kinds of stimuli. … In my 20s, I felt lucky [that] I had chances to play -- and I was seeing many parts of the world for the first time. Then in my late 20s, I got married, and then the children came along, which makes you more empathetic to the world. In my 30s, it was about exploration -- exploring with friends of mine who were a couple of decades older, who had access to a different history, snapshots of the world we can’t see anymore from people who can report it because they’ve been there. It’s a kind of curiosity. In my 40s, I started to think more about … ‘What, really, what is it all for?’ ”

Ma thankfully found the answer in 1998 with his founding of the Silk Road Project, which has allowed him to merge his passion for anthropology with that for his music.

Historically, the Silk Road was the name given to the land and sea trade routes of Eurasia that crossed from the Pacific to the Middle East to the Mediterranean between 2000 BC and 100 AD. Goods, cultures, religion, and musical instruments all intermingled.