Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art

Praise for Free Play

"When I first heard Stephen Nachmanovitch in San Francisco and when he later visited my school in England, I was captivated by his being, as were all others. Now, having read Free Play, I understand his approach more deeply. Would that Free Play found its way into every school, office, hospital, and factory. It is a most exciting book and a most important one."

—YEHUDI MENUHIN, VIOLINIST

I am grateful to Stephen Nachmanovitch for sharing his wisdom in these pages. I expect—I hope—to be rereading his book and practicing with it for the rest of my life.

—RUTH OZEKI, AUTHOR OF THE BOOK OF FORM AND EMPTINESS

Stephen Nachmanovitch has produced a celebration of human uniqueness. In so doing, he helps us to make better use of our resources of playfulness, ingenuity, and creativity in general. What it amounts to is a guide for getting the most out of whatever is possible.

—NORMAN COUSINS, AUTHOR OF THE ANATOMY OF AN ILLNESS

I absolutely love this book. What a blissful, friendly, fiercely intelligent thing; it expresses truths that I am groping toward in a way that is emboldening and clarifying. I don’t think I have ever felt so happy to shout about or recommend a book, and I know I will read it again and again.

—CATHY RENTZENBRINK, AUTHOR OF WRITE IT ALL DOWN

Stephen Nachmanovitch’s prose is really poetry. Every page has a fresh thought, a bracing new way of looking at the familiar, a penetrating insight or a wise bit of advice. And reading it is so thoroughly enjoyable!

—WILLIS HARMAN, REGENT, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

The mother of all improvisation books.

—JEFFREY AGRELL, UNIVERSITY OF IOWA 

This book is important not only because it delves into the creative process, but also because Nachmanovitch creates the opportunity for the reader to get in touch with his/her own creative possibilities and abilities. This is an essential book for everyone.

—HARVARD EDUCATIONAL REVIEW

The kit of tools Nachmanovitch lays before us are high-level generalizations, and could be applied equally well to just about any discipline from cooking to comedy. His intent is clearly unitary. He circles like a falcon around the inexpressible. His text is the finger in the haiku, pointing at the moon.

—KEYBOARD MAGAZINE

"Free Play is a superb guide for anyone who aspires to create, whatever the medium."

—NEW WOMAN

an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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First published in the United States as Free Play by Penguin/Tarcher, in 1990.

Copyright © 1990 by Stephen Nachmanovitch

Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

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Trade paperback ISBN 9780874776317

Ebook ISBN 9781440673085

Book design by Patrice Sheridan

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Contents

A New Flute

It’s a Mystery

THE SOURCES

Inspiration and Time’s Flow

The Vehicle

The Stream

The Muse

Mind at Play

Disappearing

THE WORK

Sex and Violins

Practice

The Power of Limits

The Power of Mistakes

Playing Together

Form Unfolding

OBSTACLES AND OPENINGS

Childhood’s End

Vicious Circles

The Judging Spectre

Surrender

Patience

Ripening

THE FRUITS

Eros and Creation

Quality

Art for Life’s Sake

Heartbreakthrough

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Illustrations

Notes

About the Author

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Paint as you like and die happy.

HENRY MILLER

A New Flute

A god can do it. But will you tell me how a man can penetrate through the lyre’s strings?

RANIER MARIA RILKE[1]

There is an old Sanskrit word, lîla, which means play. Richer than our word, it means divine play, the play of creation, destruction, and re-creation, the folding and unfolding of the cosmos. Lîla, free and deep, is both the delight and enjoyment of this moment, and the play of God. It also means love.

Lîla may be the simplest thing there is—spontaneous, childish, disarming. But as we grow and experience the complexities of life, it may also be the most difficult and hard-won achievement imaginable, and its coming to fruition is a kind of homecoming to our true selves.

I want to begin with a story. Transcribed from Japanese folk sources,[2] it covers the whole sweep of the journey we will take in these pages. It gives us a taste of the attainment of free play, of the kind of creative breakthrough from which art and originality emerge. It is a tale of a young musician’s journey from mere brilliance toward a more genuine artistry, one that emerges unimpeded from the very source of life:

A new flute was invented in China. A Japanese master musician discovered the subtle beauties of its tone and brought it back home, where he gave concerts all around the country. One evening he played with a community of musicians and music lovers who lived in a certain town. At the end of the concert, his name was called. He took out the new flute and played one piece. When he was finished, there was silence in the room for a long moment. Then the voice of the oldest man was heard from the back of the room: Like a god!

The next day, as this master was packing to leave, the musicians approached him and asked how long it would take a skilled player to learn the new flute. Years, he said. They asked if he would take a pupil, and he agreed. After he left, they decided among themselves to send a young man, a brilliantly talented flutist, sensitive to beauty, diligent and trustworthy. They gave him money for his living expenses and for the master’s tuition, and sent him on his way to the capital, where the master lived.

The student arrived and was accepted by his teacher, who assigned him a single, simple tune. At first he received systematic instruction, but he easily mastered all the technical problems. Now he arrived for his daily lesson, sat down, and played his tune—and all the master could say was, Something lacking. The student exerted himself in every possible way; he practiced for endless hours; yet day after day, week after week, all the master said was, Something lacking. He begged the master to change the tune, but the master said no. The daily playing, the daily Something lacking continued for months on end. The student’s hope of success and fear of failure became ever magnified, and he swung from agitation to despondency.

Finally the frustration became too much for him. One night he packed his bag and slinked out. He continued to live in the capital city for some time longer, until his money ran dry. He began drinking. Finally, impoverished, he drifted back to his own part of the country. Ashamed to show his face to his former colleagues, he found a hut far out in the countryside. He still possessed his flutes, still played, but found no new inspiration in music. Passing farmers heard him play and sent their children to him for beginner’s lessons. He lived this way for years.

One morning there was a knock at his door. It was the oldest past-master from his town, along with the youngest student. They told him that tonight they were going to have a concert, and they had all decided it would not take place without him. With some effort they overcame his feelings of fear and shame, and almost in a trance he picked up a flute and went with them. The concert began. As he waited behind the stage, no one intruded on his inner silence. Finally, at the end of the concert, his name was called. He stepped out onto the stage in his rags. He looked down at his hands, and realized that he had chosen the new flute.

Now he realized that he had nothing to gain and nothing to lose. He sat down and played the same tune he had played so many times for his teacher in the past. When he finished, there was silence for a long moment. Then the voice of the oldest man was heard, speaking softly from the back of the room: Like a god!

It’s a Mystery

Improvisation, it is a mystery. You can write a book about it, but by the end no one still knows what it is. When I improvise and I’m in good form, I’m like somebody half sleeping. I even forget there are people in front of me. Great improvisers are like priests; they are thinking only of their god.

STÉPHANE GRAPPELLI[1]

I am a musician. One of the things I love best is to give totally improvised concerts on violin, viola, and electric violin. There is something energizing and challenging about being one-to-one with the audience and creating a piece of work that has both the freshness of the fleeting moment and—when everything is working—the structural tautness and symmetry of a living organism. It can be a remarkable and often moving experience in direct communication.

My experience of playing in this way is that I am not doing something; it’s more like following, or taking dictation. This is, of course, a feeling that has been expressed many times by composers, poets, and other artists. There is the story of one of Bach’s pupils asking him, Papa, how do you ever think of so many tunes? to which Bach replied, My dear boy, my greatest difficulty is to avoid stepping on them when I get up in the morning. And there is the famous example of Michelangelo’s theory of sculpture: The statue is already in the stone, has been in the stone since the beginning of time, and the sculptor’s job is to see it and release it by carefully scraping away the excess material. William Blake, in a similar vein, writes of melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite, which was hid.[2]

This book is about the inner sources of spontaneous creation. It is about where art comes from. I mean art in the widest sense. I have seen an automobile mechanic open the hood of my car and work with that special sensitivity of hand and eye, that deftness and readiness to absorb surprises, that quality of connectedness and wholeness, which we also recognize in a fine pianist, painter, or poet.

This book is directed toward people in any field who want to contact and strengthen their own creative powers. Its purpose is to propagate the understanding, joy, responsibility, and peace that come from the full use of the human imagination.

The questions we will delve into concern how intuitive music, or inspiration of any kind, arises within us, how it may be blocked, derailed, or obscured by certain unavoidable facts of life, and how it is finally liberated—how we are finally liberated—to speak or sing, write or paint, with our own authentic voice. Such questions lead us directly into territory where many religions and philosophies, as well as the actual experience of practicing artists, seem to converge.

What is the Source we tap into when we create? What did the old poets mean when they talked about the muse? Who is she? Where does the play of imagination come from? When are sounds music? When are patterns and colors art? When are words literature? When is instruction teaching? How do we balance structure and spontaneity, discipline and freedom? How does the passion of the artist’s life get coded into the artwork? How do we as creators of artwork see to it that the original vision and passion that motivate us get accurately portrayed in our moment-to-moment creative activity? How do we as witnesses of artwork decode or release that passion when the artist is gone and we have only the artwork itself before us, to see and listen to, to remember and accept? How does it feel to fall in love with an instrument and an art?

I began writing this book as an exploration of the inner dimensions of improvisation. I found it inescapably fascinating that the conception, composition, practice, and performance of a piece of music could blossom in a single moment, and come out whole and satisfying. When I first found myself improvising, I felt with great excitement that I was onto something, a kind of spiritual connectedness that went far beyond the scope of music making. At the same time, improvisation extended the scope and relevance of music making until the artificial boundary between art and life disintegrated. I had found a freedom that was both exhilarating and exacting. Looking into the moment of improvisation, I was uncovering patterns related to every kind of creativity; uncovering clues as well to living a life that is self-creating, self-organizing, and authentic. I came to see improvisation as a master key to creativity.

In a sense, all art is improvisation. Some improvisations are presented as is, whole and at once; others are doctored improvisations that have been revised and restructured over a period of time before the public gets to enjoy the work. A composer who writes on paper is still improvising to begin with (if only mentally), then taking the products of the improvisation and refining and applying technique and theory to them. Composing, wrote Arnold Schoenberg, is a slowed-down improvisation; often one cannot write fast enough to keep up with the stream of ideas.[3] Finished artworks that we see and may love deeply are in a sense the relics or traces of a journey that has come and gone. What we reach through improvisation is the feel of the journey itself.

•   •   •

Improvisation is the most natural and widespread form of music making. Up until the last century, it was integral even to our literate musical tradition in the West. Leonardo da Vinci was one of the great pioneers of improvisation on the viola da braccio, and with his friends put on entire operas in which both the poetry and the music were made up on the spot.[4] In Baroque music, the art of playing keyboard instruments from a figured bass (a harmonic outline that the player fills in according to the fancy of the moment) resembled the modern jazz musician’s art of playing over themes, motifs, or chord changes. In classical times, the cadenzas of violin, piano, and other concertos were meant to be improvised—a chance for the player to put their own creative display into the total artwork. Both Bach and Mozart were renowned as very free, agile, imaginative improvisers, and many stories, both moving and amusing, are attached to their exploits in this field. Beethoven, when he first came to Vienna, became known as an astounding improviser on the piano, and only later as a composer. Here are the reports of two musician-witnesses:

I fancy that to these improvisations of Beethoven’s I owe my most vivid musical impressions. I maintain that unless one has heard him improvise well and quite at ease, one can but imperfectly appreciate the vast scope of his genius. . . . His tempestuous inspiration poured forth such lovely melodies and harmonies unsought, because, mastered by musical emotion, he gave no thought to the search after effects that might have occurred to him with pen in hand.[5]

He knew how to make such an impression on every listener that frequently there was not a single dry eye, while many broke out into loud sobs: For there was a certain magic in his expression aside from the beauty and originality of his ideas and his genial way of presenting them. When he had concluded an improvisation of this kind, he was capable of breaking out into boisterous laughter.[6]

Unfortunately, tape recorders were not available in those days. So when artists wanted to preserve their music, they had to be as deft with the pen as they were with their instruments. Mozart was perhaps the greatest improviser with pen and paper. He often wrote the fair copies of his scores and parts straight out, inventing the music as fast as the pen would go and hardly ever blotting a line. Beethoven, by contrast, intimately knowing the sounds he wanted, carrying them in his head for years at a time, could only record them on paper