Quote

Improvisation is intuition in action, a way to discover the muse and learn to respond to her call.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The beauty of playing together is meeting in the One.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
We can depend on the world being a perpetual surprise in perpetual motion.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
Image
If we split practice from the real thing, neither one of them will be very real.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
Image
The most potent muse of all is our own inner child.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
Image
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
Image
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
Image
To do anything artistically you have to acquire technique, but create through your technique and not with it.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
Image
Memory and intention and intuition are fused. The iron is always hot.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
Image
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
Image
An improviser does not operate from a formless vacuum, but from three billion years of organic evolution
Stephen Nachmanovitch
Image
If we are transparent, with nothing to hide, the gap between language and being disappears. Then the Muse can speak.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
Image
The noun of self becomes a verb. This flashpoint of creation in the present moment is where work and play merge.
Stephen Nachmanovitch
Image
There are only people doing their imperfect best at doing their imperfect jobs
Stephen Nachmanovitch