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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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Stephen Nachmanovitch
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: November 2
Author
Jazz Musician
Respond
Intuition
Discover
Call
Learn
Action
Way
Improvisation
Muse

More quotes by Stephen Nachmanovitch

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With too little judgement, we get trash. With too much judgement, we get blockage.
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Commitment to a set of rules frees your play to attain a profundity and vigor otherwise impossible.
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We can depend on the world being a perpetual surprise in perpetual motion.
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Any action can be practiced as an art, as a craft, or as drudgery.
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Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of ones chosen form.
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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
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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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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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We provide both irritation and inspiration for each other- the grist for each other's pearl making.
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.
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The beauty of playing together is meeting in the One.
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The most potent muse of all is our own inner child.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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If we are transparent, with nothing to hide, the gap between language and being disappears. Then the Muse can speak.
Stephen Nachmanovitch