Tag Archives: Stephen Nachmanovitch

Improv Quote of the Day: Symbols More Prized than the Music?

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Example of a music manuscript: Johann Sebastia...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Music represented symbolically is regarded as more acceptable than music which happens in real time as sound. We have fallen under the sway of a strange inversion in which symbols are regarded as more real than the realities they represent. Music (or art, literature, theater, science, technology) is often treated as a collection of works arranged on a historical timeline. The scores are regarded as having not only an independent existence, but a higher existence than a performance.

– Stephen Nachmanovitch (from “It Don’t Mean a Thing (if it ain’t got that swing): Bateson and the How of Knowing”)

Improv Quote of the Day: Risky Practice!

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English: RISK surrounded by text

The requisite variety that opens up our expressive possibilities comes from practice, play, exercise, exploration, experiment. The effects of nonpractice (or of insufficiently risky practice) are rigidity of heart and body, and an ever-shrinking compass of available variety.

–Stephen Nachmanovitch

Improv Quote of the Day: How Did the Dots Get There?

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Example of game

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 what I can say is about music. The real story is about spontaneous expression, and it is therefore a spiritual and a psychological story rather than a story about the technique of one art form or another.

–Stephen Nachmanovitch

Improv Quote of the Day: Don’t Put Up With It

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Major and minor scale

You don’t have to practice boring exercises, but you have to practice something. If you find the practice boring, you don’t run away from it, but don’t tolerate it either. Transform it into something that suits you. If you are bored playing a scale, play the same eight tones but change the order. Then change the rhythm. Then change the tone color. Presto, you have just improvised. If you don’t think the result is very good, you have the power to change it- now there is both a supply of raw material and some judgment to feed back the process. This is especially effective with classically trained musicians who think they can’t play without a score or develop technique without exact repetition of some exercises in a book. –Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play