Stephen Nachmanovitch (born 1950) is an American musician, author, artist, and educator. He performs and teaches internationally as an improvisational violinist, and at the intersections of performing and multimedia arts, philosophy, and ecology.

Biography

Born in 1950, Nachmanovitch grew up in Los Angeles and studied at Harvard University and the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he earned a PhD in the History of Consciousness for an exploration of William Blake. His mentor was the anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson. At Harvard he worked with Jerome Bruner and Irven DeVore. He has taught and lectured widely in the United States and abroad on creativity and the spiritual underpinnings of art. Since the 1970s he was a pioneer in free improvisation on violin, viola and electric violin and opened up many techniques now used in electroacoustic music. He has presented master classes and workshops in improvisation at many conservatories and universities worldwide, including the Yehudi Menuhin School and Juilliard. He has had numerous appearances on radio, television, and at music and theater festivals. He has collaborated with other artists in media including music, dance, theater, and film, and has developed programs melding art, music, literature, and computer technology. He has published articles in a variety of fields since 1966, and is the author of Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art (Penguin-Tarcher, 1990), and The Art of Is: Improvising as a Way of Life, (New World Library, 2019). Much of his teaching beyond music and the arts relates to the universality of improvisation and creativity in all fields of life, and the accessibility of improvisational process to each person at each moment It is the most normal thing in the world to improvise. We improvise every time we say a sentence, but we are told in our veneration of the masters that the creative process is some sort of mysterious and godlike thing only possessed by a few people – when in fact we are improvising all the time, creating all the time. In the 1980s and 1990s he created computer music software including The World Music Menu (first developed 1987, new versions through 2007), and the visual music software tools Zmusic (first presented at the Visual Music Alliance, Los Angeles, 1987) and Visual Music Tone Painter (first developed 1992, new versions through 2007). The World Music Menu was the first commercially available program to allow synthesizers to play in world and microtonal scales outside of western Equal Temperament. It enabled retuning on-the-fly, and allowed MIDI compositions to be transposed into some 125 different scales from ancient Greece, India, Bali/Indonesia, the Middle East, Africa, and various mathematical temperaments. In the years following the millennium his time has been divided between improvisation concerts on violin, viola, electric violin and viola d'amore, both solo and in partnership with other musicians, dancers, and theater artists, lecturing and teaching workshops on improvisation, writing about creativity and about the influence of Gregory Bateson on modern thought, and visual music and other multimedia works. He has served on the boards of the International Society for Improvised Music, the New Violin Family Association and the Bateson Idea Group. Regarding Nachmanovitch's 2023 recorded cycle, Music from Before the Beginning, The Strad magazine wrote: Psychologist, philosopher, academic, writer, even computer pioneer, mind-boggling US polymath Stephen Nachmanovitch is also a performer across several stringed instruments, both acoustic and electric, and a long-standing blurrer of boundaries between composed music and improvisation. It’s probably no surprise, then, that his most recent release takes a weighty subject as its underlying theme: the earliest forms of life, and processes of organic evolution.

Works

Books

Writings on music and creativity

Writings on Gregory Bateson

Social thought

Early work

Discography

Multimedia

Personal life

Nachmanovitch is married to Leslie Jackson Blackhall, M.D., a palliative care physician who is on the faculty at the University of Virginia. They met in 1989 at the Dalai Lama’s Kalachakra teachings in Los Angeles, and were married in Los Angeles in 1991. They have two sons, the poet Jack Nachmanovitch (born 1993) and the visual artist Gregory Nachmanovitch (born 1997).