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Commitment to a set of rules frees your play to attain a profundity and vigor otherwise impossible.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

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Stephen Nachmanovitch
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: November 2
Author
Jazz Musician
Attain
Otherwise
Commitment
Rules
Impossible
Play
Profundity
Frees
Vigor

More quotes by Stephen Nachmanovitch

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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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Improvisation is intuition in action, a way to discover the muse and learn to respond to her call.
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The beauty of playing together is meeting in the One.
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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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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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There are only people doing their imperfect best at doing their imperfect jobs
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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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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 noun of self becomes a verb. This flashpoint of creation in the present moment is where work and play merge.
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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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We provide both irritation and inspiration for each other- the grist for each other's pearl making.
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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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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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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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If we split practice from the real thing, neither one of them will be very real.
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Memory and intention and intuition are fused. The iron is always hot.
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With too little judgement, we get trash. With too much judgement, we get blockage.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
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Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of ones chosen form.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
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We can depend on the world being a perpetual surprise in perpetual motion.
Stephen Nachmanovitch