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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
Otherwise
Commitment
Rules
Impossible
Play
Profundity
Frees
Vigor
Attain

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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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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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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 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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There are only people doing their imperfect best at doing their imperfect jobs
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Memory and intention and intuition are fused. The iron is always hot.
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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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Any action can be practiced as an art, as a craft, or as drudgery.
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With too little judgement, we get trash. With too much judgement, we get blockage.
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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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Improvisation is intuition in action, a way to discover the muse and learn to respond to her call.
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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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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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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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Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of ones chosen form.
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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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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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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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