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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
Learn
Action
Way
Improvisation
Muse
Respond
Intuition
Discover
Call

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The beauty of playing together is meeting in the One.
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With too little judgement, we get trash. With too much judgement, we get blockage.
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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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The most potent muse of all is our own inner child.
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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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Commitment to a set of rules frees your play to attain a profundity and vigor otherwise impossible.
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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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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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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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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.
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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.
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We can depend on the world being a perpetual surprise in perpetual motion.
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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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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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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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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 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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If we split practice from the real thing, neither one of them will be very real.
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