Creativity wears many hats. None of us have any problem recognizing a novelist, playwright, composer, painter, or sculptor as a creative artist. I'm none of those. Yet I consider myself a creative artist, although some might limit my membership to my occasional piano improv. But I'm not thinking about that. I'm thinking of my second career as a public lecturer and commentator on music. Some of my presentations take the form of the written word; others are altogether verbal; still others mix verbal with images and sounds. They're artisan products in one sense, creative art in another. To me they're creative works, plain and simple.
No presentation snaps into being all by itself. Plodding and uncreative folk produce plodding and uncreative presentations, so neatly summarized by that delightful yet misleading phrase Death by PowerPoint. Delightful thanks to its fine rhythm, its tripping assonance, its resonance with authentically lethal counterparts, and its evocation of an infinite tedium of bullet points. Misleading because it isn't PowerPoint per se that's guilty; Microsoft's presentation software provides the tools only and can be harnessed to create dazzling accoutrements to even the most staid of topics.
That's not to say that my creative well-being depends on presentation software. I'm just fine talking extempore without any software assistance, or limiting myself to a few musical examples via an iPhone-speaker combo. All such digital enhancements are peripheral to the heart of the thing, which is to communicate something to somebody else.
Which is why it's a creative act. Imagination is a requirement, not an enhancement. A public presentation calls for the paired gifts of writer and performer, creator and re-creator, a Kreisler playing his own Tambourin Chinois, a Dickens reading The Old Curiosity Shop, a Shakespeare playing the Ghost in Hamlet. Giving a compelling public presentation requires knowledge, preparation, commitment, technique, rehearsal, practice, and a big slice o' ham. And two more attributes: confidence and patience. Confidence that the overall shape of the presentation will eventually reveal itself, like a lotus emerging from the river mud. Patience to refrain from making any firm decisions until said lotus is in view.
Inspiration dwells in gently gurgling subterranean realms. As the stream of meaningless mental blather flows by, a worthwhile nugget surfaces. A shiny something that reflects a flash of light and attracts attention, the idea bobbles along, slowly enough to be snagged by the attentive gatherer at stream's edge yet sufficiently speedy that it will soon whisk out of sight around the next bend.
As a rule it's an unprepossessing catch, a lumpy trifle without apparent value. That's all it may be. The trick is to determine gold from dross. Hey, start out with a comparison between Dvořák and Haydn: dross, as I sadly contemplated a finished but stinky program note with a worthless lead that festered noisomely in its own misbegotten juices. Hey, base it all on the symphony's major & minor thirds motif: gold, as I followed up with an engaging and informative talk on the Sibelius 2nd Symphony for the SF Symphony. Unworkable ideas must be discarded without a moment's hesitation; the dreaded Gollum Syndrome ("the precious, the precious!!") may follow otherwise. Good ones must not be allowed to bobble away.
No matter what the source of the original inspiration, the bulk of it comes in the working out. Thomas Edison: 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. Mais oui, absolument. Tuckus time, strolling time, thinking time. Scribbling-clicking-drawing-listening time. Dissing time. Re-doing time. It can't be rushed and it can't be forced, but it can be organized. The creative artist is disciplined and realistic, honestly critical of both good and bad work. The end result emerges gradually as a rule, sometimes after many trials, sometimes with apparent inevitability.
Perhaps I'm being tiresomely relativist if I lump lecturing into the same dough as writing a symphony or chiseling a statue out of marble, thereby aligning myself with touchy-feelies who declare that baking a good cupcake is an art right up there with painting the Sistine Chapel. There's an episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show in which Mary meets Lou Grant's current enamorata, a world-weary nightclub entertainer played with pitch-perfect ennui by Sherrie North. "So, you're a pianist, right?" asks Mary in an attempt to make chit-chat. "Wrong," retorts Sherrie, "Vladimir Horowitz is a pianist. I'm a saloon singer."
I can only hope that I'm not embracing delusion by treating my puny lectures as artistic creations. Yet I'm willing to make the claim, largely I think because I treat my presentations as performances of my own compositions rather than merely routine tasks. As an artist, I depend on the inscrutable workings of an inner Muse and my own flowing river of ideas. Maybe that's true of the cupcake people, too. But I'm sure that it isn't true of the PowerPoint executioners, those bullies of the bullet point, they who can't tell Muse from Mucinex and would scorn even the most intoxicating inspiration as silly frou-frou.