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 Copy Share Image
Improvisation is intuition in action, a way to discover the muse and learn to respond to her call. — Stephen Nachmanovitch Copy Share 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… — Stephen Nachmanovitch Copy Share Image
Play cannot be defined, because in play all definitions slither, dance, combine, break apart, and recombine. — Stephen Nachmanovitch Copy Share Image
Play enables us to rearrange our capacities and our very identity so that they can be used in unforeseen ways — Stephen Nachmanovitch Copy Share Image
If we are transparent, with nothing to hide, the gap between language and being disappears. Then the Muse can speak. — Stephen Nachmanovitch Copy Share Image
Many musicians are fabulously skilled at playing the black dots on the printed page, but mystified by how the dots got there in the first place and apprehensive of playing without dots. Music theory does not help here; it teaches rules of the grammar, but not what to say. When people ask me how to improvise, only a little of… — Stephen Nachmanovitch Copy Share
In the art of teaching, we recognize that ideas and insights need to cook over a period of time. Sometimes the student who is least articulate about expressing the ideas is in fact the one who is absorbing and processing them most deeply. This applies as well to our own private learning of our art form; the areas in which… — Stephen Nachmanovitch Copy Share
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… — Stephen Nachmanovitch Copy Share Image
Every attempt we make is imperfect; yet each one of those imperfect attempts is an occasion for a delight unlike anything else on earth. — Stephen Nachmanovitch Copy Share Image
An improviser does not operate from a formless vacuum, but from three billion years of organic evolution — Stephen Nachmanovitch Copy Share Image
Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of ones chosen form. — Stephen Nachmanovitch Copy Share 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.… — Stephen Nachmanovitch Copy Share Image
