Improvisation is really the deepest way to deal with moment-by-moment reality in music. There is no deeper way, personally deeper. But there is no less depth in working with someone else’s music — having found his depth becomes exactly the same. And the people who think the two things are different are going to lose out when they come to listen to one or the other.
“Camille Claudel lived the last thirty years of her life in an asylum, wondering why, writing letters to her brother the poet, who had signed the papers. Come visit me, she says. Remember I am living here with madwomen, days are long. She did not smoke or stroll. She refused to sculpt. Although they gave her sleep stones – marble and granite and porphyry – she broke them, then collected the pieces and buried these outside the walls at night. Night was when her hands grew, huger and huger until in the photograph they are like two parts of someone else loaded onto her knees.”
Anne Carson | “Short Talk on Sleep Stones”