Improvising Quotes
When I'm on stage, it's a little world I've created where I'm sort of the thing, so I have total control over everything that happens. When we're improvising, I'm with someone I totally trust. I know things are going to work out. I don't have those guarantees in life. There are no consequences on stage.
Colin Mochrie
As a theorist I have great advantages. All I need is a pencil (now a ball pen) and an empty pad of paper. There are analysts who sit and look vacantly out the window, but after the age of 20 I was not one of them. I ought to envy the new generation who have grown up with the computer, but I don't. None of them known to me sits idly at the console, improvising and experimenting in the way that a composer does at the piano. That ought to become increasingly possible. But up to now, in my observation, the computer is largely a black box into which researchers feed raw input and out of from which they draw various summarizing measures and simulations. Not having access to look around in the box, the investigator has less intuitive familiarity with the data than used to be the case in the bad old days.
Paul Samuelson
On live performance: "Yes. l'd really like to do some concerts of completely improvised music, but one of the reasons for doing a concert is to experience the enjoyment of the people there, so you have to include excerpts of music from previous albums because they want to hear something they already know and like. There's nothing wrong with limiting your spontaneous playing to just improvising around old themes, but what is wrong is playing a concert solely to promote a certain record. I've never done a concert tour just to promote Heaven and Hell or Chariots or anything like that. That sort of thing seems pointless to me."
Vangelis
Our political capacity for avoiding upheavals, our gift for "animated moderation" (in Bagehot's phrase), has long been envied by our continental neighbours. They will find once again, I venture to prophesy, that we shall get together and modify presently our institutions to suit the new conditions. We are not good at planning ahead, but we have a gift for improvising and compromising.
Stanley Baldwin
Interpretation is as improvisation as improvising from silence is. It is just a different way of looking at it. When you improvise form interpretation you have certain dramatic ideas, you have a certain structure. But you know that everything that is in that is relative and flexible. Even pitch can be a matter of interpretation. Rhythm is relative.
Hilary Hahn
I did not teach him everything he knows. He just absorbed everything I knew. The rest he discovered himself by asking, probing, begging, watching, observing, reading, demanding, investigating, improvising, experimenting, experiencing, learning and not being afraid of stretching himself beyond his own limits. I only gave him the platform and the opportunity to discover himself. In the process, I was blessed enough to discover myself.
Kamal Haasan
I find that it is very useful to look over the location and to feel out the atmosphere while waiting for the actors. It may happen that the images before my eyes coincide with those I had in my mind, but this is not frequently the case. It more often happens that there is something insincere or artificial about the image one has thought of. Here again is another way of improvising.
Michelangelo Antonioni
