And so I have one word of advice, and I include myself here: if we're going to stick our necks out, let's not limit ourselves to musical choices. Let's not just seek out well-wishers and supporters for an audience, and not count cd sales as personal victories-that is the trap our culture has manufactured to contain dissident culture along with the mainstream. Instead, let's make the effort to play for people we can't imagine would like us. Get out of the improv ghetto and into the unknown, the small towns, libraries, prisons, where we don't know who will show interest, come in the door. Find the world, let the world find us. After all, it is the unknown response that can awaken us musically in ways beyond our imagination.

- Jack Wright

A new listener to freely improvised music comes to this experience not as a fresh mind. Every listener has a wealth of listening experience. They may have been taught western classical. They may be embued with the folk music of their ethnic culture. They may have been thoroughly lost in the hedonism of rock and roll. When such a person comes to another form of music, whose rules of performance (and of listening) are different from what they have experienced so far, they are confused. The sounds, the anticipated meanings and the expected effects, do not occur. They suffer what I call an aesthetic mis-match. Small wonder then without gaining some understanding about the rules of engagement and the musical objectives, that a new listener is completely bewildered by what they hear. If this is the case, then it follows that there must be some kind of specific analytical framework for free improvisation, as there is for every other kind of music. To deny this fact is in a way to deny entry for others into this world, and it also hampers the music's development.

- Eddie Prévost

Maybe I'm suggesting that while we make our own music, we are actually proposing a certain way of life. It's an attitude towards the world. If it isn't, why are we doing it? Are we simply interested in sound for sound's sake? I'm sure people think that. I don't believe it. In the end there is more to it than that. But I can't prove it.

- Anonymous, from Blocks of Consciousness and the Unbroken Continuum, p. 248