Any Questions?
Isn’t it amazing how quickly life moves on? Only last week, the General Election was a few days behind us and it was hard to think about anything else. Now, seven days later, my head is full of thoughts about marking the work of the lovely students of Middlesex University; meetings of the Royal Musical Association; a trip to the Brighton Festival to see the fabulous Alice Coote in Being Both; and plans for a study day next week on women in the world of music.
As a freelancer, this is one of my very great privileges, as well as one of the challenges of my existence: life moves quickly, and there are many juggling balls to be kept in the air at any given time. It is dizzying, exciting, occasionally exhausting and seemingly impossible, but never less than hugely rewarding. It also, I think, makes me better at each of the individual things that I do. At root, there is a small skill set that is transferrable across many jobs – research techniques, administrative nous, creative shaping of materials and formats, communication (in print or spoken, for a range of audiences), piano playing. Taken together, though, they all inform each other, and allow me to enhance all of my various tasks. This might manifest itself in something as simple as having a curious or unusual fact at my disposal with which to introduce a performance, thanks to other reading I’ve been doing. Or it might mean that I have a better sense of how to best get a point across, based on the experience of explaining it to several different kinds of audiences in different ways. Or – and this is the really amazing one – it might mean that I see, all of a sudden, not just the little corner of ideas at which I’m currently staring, but how they fit within a plan of the building, a layout of the town, a map of the country. That is when really exciting ideas and connections can be made.
This might all sound rather abstract, but it is what should be required of good communicators every day. Those communicators affect every sphere of our lives: they are newsreaders, journalists, critics, anchormen, chatshow hosts, actors, directors, teachers, politicians… the best of them, the really creative ones, can both see that huge map of interconnections and use that to enrich the way in which they share information with us. They colour our perspectives of the world as we live in it now, and how we view other countries, other cultures, other times. They are immensely powerful.
And, curiously, the secret to creative communication, I have learned, is not in fact the study of complex texts or commentaries. It is not the regurgitation of philosophies, or the conscious attempt to intellectualise an idea in order to make it clear that you think it is profound. It is, quite simply, knowing the basic facts about your subject.
How silly! How simple! But also: how surprising and challenging in an environment where facts, seemingly, are on tap, via Google, Wikipedia, and countless other resources. Because even if you think you know about something (and here I am speaking as much of myself as anyone else), the chances are that you haven’t got held in your head all the facts – the dates, the names, the places, the opus numbers, the contour of the first and second subjects – that you need to build your web of connections. Facts are everywhere, all-accessible… and thus dangerously disposable in the way that we think of them, because we can simply look again when we forget them.
There are two remedies to our factual amnesia which, in my line of work, have presented me with brisk reminders of the power of hard evidence.
The first is that happy coincidence when you find yourself working on two apparently unrelated projects simultaneously, and because your head is full of residual information about both, you end up finding connections. You might not remember all the details a month later, but in that moment you hold in your mental knapsack all the tools and tacks to pin together a few more parts of the big picture – a priceless opportunity to write it all down and retain the clarity of that image.
The second is the very best of all. It is the questioning listener or reader. It is the student who puts up their hand in class, the audience member who finds you at the end of your talk… the blog post reader who writes with an observation. Often, these questioners seem a little shy or embarrassed to be asking something so ‘basic’ or ‘simple’ – and often, what they ask for is a piece of information of some kind which they assume, since you have just spun them a mighty web of theories, you know off the top of your head. And it may well be that actually… you don’t. These are the people who keep communicators engaged, on their toes – and, if they know what’s good for them, humble. There is always more to ask and more to learn, and questioners remind us of this. So keep asking questions! And keep striving for the facts, to find them and remember the odd one or two. As we dash through our hectic existences, from one landmark to the next, a healthy dose of curiosity will only help us enjoy it all the more.
