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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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Stephen Nachmanovitch
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: November 2
Author
Jazz Musician
Anything
Artistically
Acquire
Technique
Create

More quotes by 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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With too little judgement, we get trash. With too much judgement, we get blockage.
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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If we are transparent, with nothing to hide, the gap between language and being disappears. Then the Muse can speak.
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The beauty of playing together is meeting in the One.
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An improviser does not operate from a formless vacuum, but from three billion years of organic evolution
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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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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Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of ones chosen form.
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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We provide both irritation and inspiration for each other- the grist for each other's pearl making.
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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There are only people doing their imperfect best at doing their imperfect jobs
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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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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If we split practice from the real thing, neither one of them will be very real.
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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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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Memory and intention and intuition are fused. The iron is always hot.
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.
Stephen Nachmanovitch