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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

More quotes by 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.
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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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.
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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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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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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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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As an improvising musician, I am not in the music business, I am not in the creativity business I am in the surrender business.
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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With too little judgement, we get trash. With too much judgement, we get blockage.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
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Any action can be practiced as an art, as a craft, or as drudgery.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
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The beauty of playing together is meeting in the One.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
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Memory and intention and intuition are fused. The iron is always hot.
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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If we are transparent, with nothing to hide, the gap between language and being disappears. Then the Muse can speak.
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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If we split practice from the real thing, neither one of them will be very real.
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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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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To do anything artistically you have to acquire technique, but create through your technique and not with it.
Stephen Nachmanovitch