Art & Creativity Quote by Roscoe Mitchell

Roscoe Mitchell frames “totally absorbed into music” less as a romantic vow than as a practical rerouting of identity: not retirement, not legacy-chasing, but immersion. The first clause reads like a cautious admission of desire - “I’d like to” - the language of someone negotiating time, body, and attention. Then he undercuts the wistfulness with a deadpan pivot: “Basically, that IS what I am doing.” The capitalization is doing cultural work. It’s a quiet flex, a refusal to let aspiration be mistaken for a midlife reinvention. For Mitchell, the point isn’t to become “more” of an artist; it’s to stop pretending art is separable from the daily.

The subtext lands harder when you place him in the lineage of the AACM and post-60s creative music, where “composer” often means organizer, bandleader, educator, and systems-builder. Absorption isn’t escapism; it’s discipline and infrastructure: concerts (public ritual), writing (private architecture), a life arranged around sound rather than around the market’s categories. There’s also a late-career politics here. In a culture that packages elder artists as heritage acts, Mitchell insists on the present tense. He’s not curating a museum of himself; he’s still producing.

What makes the line work is its refusal of melodrama. It’s a small, almost shrugged sentence that smuggles in a radical proposition: the most honest artistic statement might be a scheduling decision, repeated until it becomes a life.