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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.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

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Stephen Nachmanovitch
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: November 2
Author
Jazz Musician
Generally
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Creator
Performers
Comfortable
Flash
Creative
Highly
Society
Originals
Virtuoso
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Original
Dexterity
Power
Technique
Professionalism
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Creators

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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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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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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An improviser does not operate from a formless vacuum, but from three billion years of organic evolution
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Memory and intention and intuition are fused. The iron is always hot.
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There is not ultimate breakthrough what we find in the development of a creative life is an open-ended series of provisional breakthroughs. In this journey there is no endpoint, because it is the journey into the soul.
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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.
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If we split practice from the real thing, neither one of them will be very real.
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Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of ones chosen form.
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When we are totally faithful to our own individuality, we are actually following a very intricate design. This kind of freedom is the opposite of just anything.
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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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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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The beauty of playing together is meeting in the One.
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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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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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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.
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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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Writing, playing, composing, painting, reading, listening, looking-all require that we submit to being swept away by Eros, to a transformation of self of the kind that happens when we fall in love.
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Any action can be practiced as an art, as a craft, or as drudgery.
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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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