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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: 73
Born: 1950
Born: November 2
Author
Jazz Musician
Play
Profundity
Frees
Vigor
Attain
Otherwise
Commitment
Rules
Impossible

More quotes by Stephen Nachmanovitch

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To do anything artistically you have to acquire technique, but create through your technique and not with it.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
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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.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
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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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We provide both irritation and inspiration for each other- the grist for each other's pearl making.
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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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With too little judgement, we get trash. With too much judgement, we get blockage.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
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Memory and intention and intuition are fused. The iron is always hot.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
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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.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
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The most potent muse of all is our own inner child.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
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Improvisation is intuition in action, a way to discover the muse and learn to respond to her call.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
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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.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
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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.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
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We can depend on the world being a perpetual surprise in perpetual motion.
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.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
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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.
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.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
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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.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
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There are only people doing their imperfect best at doing their imperfect jobs
Stephen Nachmanovitch
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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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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.
Stephen Nachmanovitch