Quote

Working within the limits of the medium forces us to change our own limits. Improvisation is not breaking with forms and limitations just to be 'free,' but using them as the very means of transcending ourselves.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

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Stephen Nachmanovitch
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: November 2
Author
Jazz Musician
Change
Using
Improvisation
Mean
Limits
Limitations
Within
Breaking
Working
Medium
Free
Limitation
Force
Mediums
Means
Forces
Form
Forms
Transcending

More quotes by Stephen Nachmanovitch

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There are no prescriptive solutions, no grand designs for grand problems. Life's solutions lie in the minute particulars involving more and more individual people daring to create their own life and art, daring to listen to the voice within their deepest, original nature, and deeper still, the voice within the earth.
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If we split practice from the real thing, neither one of them will be very real.
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Improvisation is intuition in action, a way to discover the muse and learn to respond to her call.
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Practice is an ever-fresh, challenging flow of work and play in which we continually test and demolish our own delusions therefore, it is sometimes painful.
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If we are transparent, with nothing to hide, the gap between language and being disappears. Then the Muse can speak.
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As an improvising musician, I am not in the music business, I am not in the creativity business I am in the surrender business.
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The professionalism of technique and flash of dexterity are more comfortable to be around than raw creative power, hence our society generally rewards virtuoso performers more highly than it rewards original creators.
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Brahms once remarked that the mark of an artist is how much he throws away. Nature, the great creator, is always throwing things away. A frog lays several million eggs at a sitting. Only a few dozen of these become tadpoles, and only a few of those become frogs. We can let imagination and practice be as profligate as nature.
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An improviser does not operate from a formless vacuum, but from three billion years of organic evolution
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The noun of self becomes a verb. This flashpoint of creation in the present moment is where work and play merge.
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We can depend on the world being a perpetual surprise in perpetual motion.
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If the art is created with the whole person, then the work will come out whole. Education must teach, reach, and vibrate the whole person rather than merely transfer knowledge.
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Every moment of life is unique-a kiss, a sunset, a dance, a joke. None will ever recur in quite the same way. Each happens only once in the history of the universe.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
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The power of mistakes enables us to reframe creative blocks and turn them around...The troublesome parts of our work, the parts that are most baffling and frustrating, are in fact the growing edges. We see these opportunities the instant we drop our preconceptions and our self-importance.
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The most potent muse of all is our own inner child.
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We provide both irritation and inspiration for each other- the grist for each other's pearl making.
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To do anything artistically you have to acquire technique, but create through your technique and not with it.
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Paradoxically, the more you are yourself, the more universal your message. As you develop and individuate more deeply, you break through into deeper layers of the collective consciousness and the collective unconsciousness.
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In improvisation, there is only one time. This is what computer people call real time. The time of inspiration, the time of technically structuring and realizing... the time of playing it, and the time of communicating with the audience, are all one.
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Commitment to a set of rules frees your play to attain a profundity and vigor otherwise impossible.
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