Improvisation, Play, and the Creative Process: A conversation between Ivan Magrin-Chagnolleau and Stephen Nachmanovitch
Ivan Magrin-Chagnolleau
Chapman University, Orange, California, USA
Citer cet article
Magrin-Chagnolleau, I. (2025). Improvisation, Play, and the Creative Process: A conversation between Ivan Magrin-Chagnolleau and Stephen Nachmanovitch. p-e-r-f-o-r-m-a-n-c-e, 8.
Abstract
Stephen Nachmanovitch discusses the origins of Free Play and reflects on creativity, improvisation, spirituality, education, and artificial intelligence. Drawing on experiences as a violinist, writer, and lifelong student of improvisation, he argues that play is a fundamental condition of creative activity. The conversation explores the intersections of art and spiritual practice, the social dimensions of creativity, lessons drawn from birdsong and animal behavior, and the limitations of contemporary AI systems. Throughout, Nachmanovitch presents creativity not as the production of novelty but as a mode of participation, discovery, and relationship with the living world.
Keywords
Creativity, improvisation, play, creative process, spirituality, artistic practice, creativity research, aesthetics, phenomenology, music improvisation, education, Gregory Bateson, artificial intelligence, birdsong, Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play, The Art of Is
Ivan Magrin-Chagnolleau: I have wanted to have this conversation for a very long time. I first read Free Play years ago, and I have returned to it again and again. I have quoted it, cited it, and recommended it. It is one of my “soul books,” if you will.
My own life moves between artistic practice and scholarship. I work across theater, film, music, writing, and the visual arts, and much of my research concerns creativity and the lived experience of creating. Your book resonated deeply with my own experience.
I would like to begin with a simple question: How did you come to write Free Play?
Stephen Nachmanovitch: There are so many ways into that story. Have you read my other book, The Art of Is?
Ivan: Yes.
Stephen: In The Art of Is, I talk about the importance of babies. One hundred percent of people have been babies, and one hundred percent of babies are musicians. So part of the origin story is simply that I was a baby, and I still am.
While we are talking, a gorgeous baby deer is walking toward my back door. It is tiny and adorable. And here comes the mother. That is a nice piece of synchronicity.
Another part of the story is that, while I was developing as an improvisational violinist in my late twenties, I met Yehudi Menuhin, who became a friend and, in a way, a mentor. One day, I was sitting with him in his hotel room in San Francisco, and he said, “You should really write a book about improvisation.”
That was the beginning of Free Play. Yehudi essentially made me write the book.
He was very interesting because he was such a wide-ranging musician and such a wide-ranging human being. He loved improvisation and improvisers, but he could not improvise himself. He made those wonderful recordings with Ravi Shankar and Stéphane Grappelli, but they had to write everything out for him.
Ivan: I did not know that.
Stephen: When he was playing those very free and beautiful pieces, he was actually playing from notation.
A good friend of mine, Larry Livingston, who is a conductor, said that the difference between improvising and composing is the difference between notation and “yes-tation.”
Once I began thinking about the book, I realized that it was not going to be about musical improvisation in itself. It was going to be about the creative process, because improvisation is at the root of the creative process.
That began a process that lasted many years. I am a very, very slow writer. At the same time, I was performing improvisational concerts, both solo and with other people. I was working with dancers, actors, and visual artists. I was also studying Zen Buddhism and other traditions very seriously. There was a great deal going on, and all of it somehow found its way into the book.
Spiritual traditions and creative practice
Ivan: You allude in the book to the spiritual dimension of the creative process. Artists often speak about that dimension without necessarily naming it.
I was raised Catholic, but over the years I explored other spiritual traditions, including shamanism, Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, Taoism, Protestantism, and Judaism. Whenever I encounter a spiritual tradition, I tend to look for the commonality beneath its particular cultural or religious context. Each tradition contributes something immense, of course, but I remain interested in what they might share at their core.
As I investigate that question, I often feel that I am also investigating the core of creativity. How would you articulate the relationship between spirituality and creativity? Are they two different things, or the same thing approached from different angles?
Stephen: There are so many angles, approaches, and traditions that do seem to lead, more or less, to the same place, although they have different styles and very different colorations.
At the same time, any one of those traditions is like an art form. You have to enter it deeply and engage with it in detail in order to get the juice from it. Whether we are speaking about spiritual, artistic, or scientific traditions, they all require a great deal of practice and detailed work before we can do something truly interesting with them.
We continually need to have one foot in the world of the generalist and one foot in the world of specialization. At any particular moment, we have to be able to concentrate deeply on something.
Ivan: I notice that you have a tabla behind you. I have just acquired my first one and started learning it.
Stephen: The tabla was actually one of my entry points into improvisation.
When I was young, I assumed I was going to be a scientist. I eventually received my academic degrees in psychology and anthropology, but I was always playing the violin. I played in orchestras, and my concept of music when I was young was essentially that you played classical compositions from a piece of paper.
After receiving my PhD in 1975, I spent a year living in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, where I worked as a high school English teacher. Somehow, and I cannot remember exactly how it happened, I began taking lessons with an Indian tabla teacher based in Geneva. I would take the train to Geneva every week or so and study with him.
I never became a good tabla player, but I learned enough to understand something about Indian music and the depth of its improvisational traditions. I became fascinated by the way improvisation takes place within particular structures and limits.
The following year, when I returned to California, I began improvising on the violin. Indian music was a huge influence on me.
Ivan: What is so interesting is that the improvisation happens in relation to an underlying composition or structure. The composition is present, but the musician improvises around it.
Stephen: Which is exactly what jazz musicians do.
Ivan: Improvisation became second nature to me because my father listened to jazz constantly when I was a child. Somehow, my subconscious learned to invent another voice within the music I was hearing. When I sing jazz, I can improvise without having to think about it.
At the same time, I learned classical piano by reading notation and playing what was written on the page. It took me much longer to improvise and compose on the piano. With the voice, I had been playing from the beginning.
The necessity of play
Ivan: There is an idea in Free Play that has become central to my own thinking: We can only truly create when we play. You connect this, of course, to the way children play, invent, and create.
The idea seems obvious to me, yet when I speak with other artists, it does not always seem obvious to them. I sometimes wonder whether that is because artists feel that they need to be taken seriously.
Stephen: That is an enormous issue.
What we do as artists, and what people do in education and many other fields, is often not well rewarded in our society unless we happen to become stars. Artists and people working in fields that resemble the arts continually encounter the need to earn money. If you want your work to be visible, and if you want other people to encounter it, then you have to be taken seriously, as we say.
The need to be taken seriously belongs to the realm of work rather than the realm of play. But work is important, too.
I am sitting in my studio on the ground floor of my house, and my office is in the next room. I have a sacred space and a secular space. I have maintained that division since I began writing Free Play.
At the time, I was staying at an artists’ colony in the mountains of Southern California. The colony consisted of four small, rustic cabins spread across hundreds of acres. There was no electricity and no telephone. We had kerosene lamps and composting toilets. It was wonderful.
I was living in a very small cabin, and I had a table where I worked. Even though I was there on retreat to do what I thought of as sacred work, I still had correspondence to answer and bills to pay. Gradually, the bills and correspondence began accumulating on the table and throbbing at me.
It occurred to me to drive to the nearest town, about ten miles away, and buy a card table and another folding chair. I put them at the opposite end of the little room. From then on, I had a sacred desk and a secular desk. I have worked that way ever since.
Of course, the sacred and secular are also connected. Many people have day jobs to support their art. I know musicians who work as waiters and waitresses. I used to write computer software to support myself, including very boring accounting software. That work paid the bills and allowed me to be a musician because the music I was making was not commercially viable.
On one level, it is useful to separate the sacred and the secular. On another, they blend and merge in countless ways.
There is the secular dimension of the sacred. If you are an author or a musician, you still have to do correspondence, communicate with your publisher, participate in interviews, and try to help people discover your work. That is the secular dimension of sacred work, and it is necessary to learn to do it well.
There is also a sacred dimension within the secular. You might be fixing the plumbing in your house, working with electricity, or dealing with your car, and you can discover something wonderful in that activity. The work we do to keep our lives going often contains surprising elements of artistry and discovery. We find patterns that connect things.
The sacred and secular are separate, and they are also intermingled.
Ivan: The element of play is essential to every artistic activity I practice. As a director, I do my best work when I genuinely play with the actors and designers. As an actor, I do my best work when I play with the director, the character, or the circumstances. The same is true in music.
Even in photography, some of my best work emerges when I stop thinking and do something unexpected. I made a series of photographs in Muir Woods in which I moved the camera while taking the pictures, which is usually the opposite of what a photographer tries to do.
Stephen: That makes me think of Spike Lee’s double-dolly technique, where the actor and the camera operator are on separate dollies that move together.
Ivan: Yes, it is a way of playing with the moment. At first, I had been taking more conventional photographs. I looked at them and thought, “These pictures already exist. They have been taken by many people before.” More importantly, they did not seem connected to the spiritual experience I was having in that place.
Then I started to play. I did things I would not normally do, and the resulting images felt closer to my actual experience. Once you discover a device or process, the work is only beginning. You then have to play with it.
I also try to create that kind of space when I teach or coach actors and other artists. I want to help them reconnect with their playfulness. I try to create a space in which they can be stupid or ridiculous and simply play.
The difficulty is that, although we all experienced play as children, we have learned to disconnect from it.
Stephen: We have absolutely learned to disconnect from it.
In The Art of Is, I write about Herbert Zipper, whom I came to know when he was an elderly man living in Los Angeles. He was a conductor and composer from Vienna who was captured by the Nazis and imprisoned in Dachau.
While he was in Dachau, he created a clandestine orchestra. He persuaded these men, who were slave laborers and prisoners, many or most of whom were going to die, to play music together.
I am sure that it was not sophisticated or brilliant music. But getting them to play at all was an extraordinary, life-giving act. Herbert Zipper was an extraordinary person.
Ivan: In teaching acting, when the students finally reach the point where they are truly playing together, there is usually an “aha” moment. Someone says, “This is so much fun,” or “I just discovered something I had never found before.”
Once they have experienced that, you know you have done your job.
Acting may be somewhat different from other art forms because it is already understood to be a strange activity. Actors are expected to do strange things, and that expectation gives us a certain freedom to experiment and explore. Other art forms may not always have such an obvious playground. We have to create the playground for ourselves.
Stephen: That is right.
From Free Play to The Art of Is
Ivan: Since writing Free Play, have you had other experiences or insights that you feel add something to what you originally wrote about creativity and play?
Stephen: Of course.
The two books on improvisation make a kind of circle. Free Play is more concerned with the spiritual and inward aspects of the creative process. The Art of Is deals more with its social and outward aspects: interaction, collaboration, teaching, art and power, and the relationship between art and society.
One of the things that interests me now grew out of my experiences since the pandemic. I am fortunate enough to have a house in the country. During the pandemic, when I could not “go anywhere,” I could still take long walks in the woods.
I had always been interested in animal communication, but I became particularly interested in birds. I started recording birdsong, bringing the recordings back into the studio, and playing with them. Since then, I have made albums containing birdsong.
When you begin reading about birdsong and other forms of animal song, including whale song, you discover that evolutionary biologists are often obsessed with the idea of purpose. Much of modern society is similarly obsessed with purpose.
There is a simplistic interpretation of Darwin according to which everything that exists in the natural world must have a purpose related to reproduction, obtaining food, or avoiding predators. Everything gets reduced to survival and the selfish gene.
We therefore attempt to decode birdsong as a set of messages about reproduction, food, and predators. People have a hard time thinking outside the shell of purpose.
This way of thinking has existed in our civilization for a very long time. It is not limited to Western civilization, but it may be especially strong in Western thought, with its attachment to utilitarianism. If something does not have a purpose, we assume that it has no explanation. We ask, “What is it for?”
Birdsong may indeed be connected with reproduction. But what if birds also sing for fun? That idea simply does not compute within the assumptions of our civilization.
What if birds do the things necessary for survival in order to be able to sing, rather than singing in order to accomplish the things necessary for survival?
A few minutes ago, we spoke about the artist who works as a waiter or waitress to support their art. Are they making art to make a living? Perhaps not. Perhaps they are making a living in order to be able to create art.
Ivan: Once the birds have done what they need to do to be fed, protected, and safe, perhaps they can spend the rest of the time flying and singing.
Stephen: Yes.
Ivan: I see something similar in our cat. He loves to play. Perhaps, in the beginning, he discovered that playing brought him attention or food. But years later, he knows that we are going to feed him anyway. Why would he continue to play if he were not doing it simply for the pleasure of playing?
Stephen: Exactly.
Can artificial intelligence play?
Ivan: I am also investigating the impact and possible usefulness of artificial intelligence algorithms in relation to creativity.
Stephen: I have seen a lot of artificial, but I have not seen intelligence.
Ivan: One of the positions I often defend is that an algorithm cannot itself be creative. On the other hand, it can be used as a tool.
Stephen: Yes, it can be a tool.
I have been working with computers all my life. As I mentioned, I began programming in the 1960s. I do not program anymore, but my studio is full of computers, and, like everyone else in our society, I use them all the time. Software can be an extremely useful tool.
Now that many companies are incorporating so-called AI into their software, I find myself reverting to older versions. Companies such as Adobe and Microsoft keep inserting generative AI into their programs. I have become very curmudgeonly about this. I carefully guard against so-called updates because the updates often make the software worse.
I have experimented with generative systems for images and little pieces of prose. It is interesting for the first minute or so. The fact that it can be done is intriguing, and it can be fun to play with briefly. But after a while, it becomes very boring.
Ivan: Do you think there is an art to prompting?
Stephen: Certainly. There can be an art to prompting, and you can produce more interesting things by playing with the prompts.
I know fellow artists who use these systems, and that is fine. My strongest objections concern the companies developing them, the concentration of power, and the way these technologies are being used to replace people.
This is part of the history of automation, which has been going on for centuries. But the current systems allow corporations to remove more people from their jobs.
Yesterday, I had an interaction with a Bank of America employee while I was helping my son with something. She was a live human being working in a call center for a large corporation. She was a genuinely kind and intelligent person. She understood the situation and actually helped us.
Whenever companies use bots or “virtual assistants,” the experience is usually extraordinarily stupid. They are incapable of understanding what you actually want. I do not care how sophisticated the systems become or how much computing power is added to them. Something about them remains inherently stupid because they emerge from an inductive process.
Artificial intelligence is generated by feeding software millions of examples: millions of photographs and millions of sentences. That is before we even consider the copyright infringement involving the people who created those photographs or wrote those sentences.
There is a bias in Western civilization toward atomization. We hear biologists and journalists talk about the “building blocks of life,” or the building blocks of this or that. The assumption is that if you know the pieces out of which something is made, you know everything that matters about it.
That is very different from what my teacher Gregory Bateson called “the pattern that connects.”
We can train software to recognize patterns, but we are still training it on patterns conceived as arrangements of building blocks. The software may perform sophisticated data processing, and sophisticated data processing certainly has its uses. But to pretend that this is creativity, or even necessarily an aid to creativity, is something else entirely.
Gregory made an important observation to me in the 1970s. This was before personal computers, of course, but we had large machines such as the IBM 360, which I worked with extensively. Those computers could be programmed to play chess. They could win games against many human beings, though not yet against the most extraordinary chess players. In the decades since then, computers have become capable of defeating all of them.
But Gregory pointed out that computers cannot play chess because computers cannot play.
A computer can do chess. It can perform the moves of chess. It can win a game in which winning is defined as producing checkmate. In a game such as Go, it can achieve a higher score than its opponent.
But it cannot play chess or play Go. It cannot enjoy a clever move.
If you and I are playing chess and you are beating me, I can still enjoy your clever moves. A so-called AI might memorize your moves and try to use them in a future game, but it cannot enjoy them.
Ivan: That is a powerful argument. I have been defending the idea that an algorithm cannot be creative, and I use several arguments to explain it. But perhaps I should rely more on this question of play.
When I begin a lecture about AI and creativity, most of the people in the room are often convinced that algorithms can be creative. By the end, many of them have reconsidered that assumption.
Stephen: An algorithm can simulate music. It can simulate visual art, and it can simulate writing. As the algorithms are trained further, they can produce increasingly sophisticated results. But they still cannot do the one basic thing that human beings can do: play.
Differences that make a difference
Stephen: An algorithm may not be able to do what a person does, but it can still work in the sense that corporations or governments will adopt it.
Let us return to the bank employee I spoke with yesterday. She was intelligent and figured out how to do something an algorithm could not do. The corporation may still replace her with an algorithm because the corporation does not care about the difference.
Gregory Bateson defined information as “a difference that makes a difference.” I can make a sound, such as tuh. There is a difference between that sound and the silence surrounding it. But it makes a difference to you because you hear it and respond to it. I might use it as part of the word that. It becomes a difference that makes a difference.
The problem is that corporations may not know the difference, or they may not care about it. They do not care that an algorithm performs a task poorly compared with a living human being. It performs some version of the task, and that may be enough for them.
Ivan: Perhaps what we are dealing with is also a shifting definition of intelligence and creativity. The definitions are sliding or being made to change.
It may seem like a semantic issue, but semantics makes a real difference here. To justify describing algorithms as intelligent or creative, people redefine intelligence and creativity, or narrow the definitions until the systems appear to qualify.
Stephen: Much of this also goes back to Alan Turing and the Turing test around 1950, which has remained an important reference ever since.
The basic question of the Turing test is this: If a human being produces one output and a computer produces another, can a person receiving those outputs tell the difference?
But there is an unspecified premise within the test. It assumes that the person on the receiving end is some kind of generic human being.
Some people may not be able to distinguish an AI-generated photograph from an actual photograph, while other people can. Human perception and knowledge exist across an enormous range. Yet the corporations producing this material, as well as political campaigns producing fake materials of various kinds, assume the existence of a generic or statistical human being on the receiving end of the Turing test.
That may be a gamble they win. H. L. Mencken said that no one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American people. Of course, I would not confine that statement to Americans. There are human beings everywhere who can be deceived in this way.
We enter the territory of science-fiction futures such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which much of the population is willing and able to be hoodwinked by these deceptions and may even be comfortable with them. Then there is a minority that refuses and moves away to the islands.
There are so many issues surrounding this.
Authenticity and perceived value
Ivan: Are we entering a kind of age of false creativity?
Stephen: Of course. But then we have to ask: What is our concept of the fake?
Let us move away from computers for a moment. I am a violinist and a great lover of the lore surrounding violins and violin makers.
In the violin world, financial value is determined by the fame of the maker, the provenance of the instrument, its condition, and the other things auction houses care about. Who was the maker? What is the provenance? Is the instrument in good condition?
The vast majority of violins made by Stradivari are absolutely amazing. But I have encountered some terrible Strads. They may be beautifully made, but they do not sound particularly good.
Most of them sound extraordinary, but some do not. Yet a Stradivarius that does not sound very good will still be valued at millions of dollars. A very fine violin by a contemporary maker may also be worth a fair amount of money, but it will never be valued as highly as a Stradivarius.
For hundreds of years, there has also been an industry devoted to fake violins. A maker might place a false label inside an instrument bearing the name of a famous maker. Sometimes the instruments are skillfully made copies that closely resemble the original maker’s work. Sometimes they are not particularly skillful copies and simply contain false labels.
A player may buy what they believe is a Guarneri. They might play it for years, make beautiful music with it, and love the experience of playing it. Then they discover that it is not really a Guarneri, and suddenly they are disappointed. It is the same instrument, but now they want to get rid of it.
Ivan: That is what we call perceived value.
Stephen: Yes. And that reminds me of the story of the Buddha’s tooth.
There is a legend from medieval Tibet about a young man who is a trader and lives with his elderly mother. He undertakes long trading journeys to India, packing his horse with goods and traveling for many months.
Before one of these journeys, his mother says, “My son, could you please bring me a relic of the Buddha? There are supposed to be many of them in India, the birthplace of Buddhism.”
He travels to India, conducts his business, and eventually begins the long journey home. By the time he is back in Tibet, leading his horse along the road, he suddenly remembers, “Oh, no. I forgot to bring my mother a relic of the Buddha.”
He notices the skull of a dog beside the road. He removes one of its back teeth, wraps it in a piece of silk, and brings it home. He presents the tooth to his mother as a relic of the Buddha.
She says, “Thank you, my son. This is wonderful.”
He does not tell her the truth.
Eventually, he leaves on another trading journey. Throughout the months he is away, he feels guilty about deceiving his mother. His guilt grows worse and worse.
When he finally returns home, he rushes into the house, ready to confess that he lied and beg her forgiveness. He opens the door and sees his mother’s altar. The tooth of the Buddha is resting upon it, and his mother is levitating two feet above the ground.
Ivan: Perceived value, or perceived meaning.
Stephen: Yes. The fake Guarneri can make fantastic music.
Imitation and electronic music
Stephen: This also relates to the world of contemporary music.
I love violins, but I also love synthesizers and electronic instruments. Synthesizers may not initially have been developed for this purpose, but one of their commercial applications was the imitation of the sounds of so-called real instruments: violins, flutes, and so forth.
A musician could purchase a synthesizer capable of sounding like 120 different instruments. You could compose and record without having an orchestra at your disposal.
Even the best of these sounds are different from the original instruments. How we perceive those differences depends partly on our familiarity with the instrument being imitated.
For example, I was sitting in my studio with a good friend who is a flutist. I said, “The flute sounds on some of these synthesizers and samplers are actually quite good. They sound fairly close to a real flute. Perhaps that has something to do with flute sounds being closer to pure sine waves. But the violin, viola, and cello sounds are terrible.”
She replied, “That is funny. When I hear those synthesized flute sounds, they are absolutely awful. But the string sounds are not too bad.”
Electronic music can be exquisitely beautiful when it is electronic music. You can create extraordinarily beautiful, interesting, new, and spiritually deep music with synthesizers and other electronic instruments without pretending that they are a bass, a flute, a violin, or something else.
Ivan: The best synthesizer sounds are often those that do not try to imitate acoustic instruments. They exist for themselves and for their own aesthetic value. The synthesizer becomes another instrument in its own right.
Stephen: That is exactly right.
Ivan: Thank you very much, Stephen.