As I am typing this, I am aboard a Frontier jet bound for Portland, Oregon- where I will be making a presentation at the National Opera Association’s convention. My talk is titled “Messing with a Masterpiece: Lessons Learned from Abridging and Arranging The Marriage of Figaro.” I will be looking back at the exhausting, yet exhilarating challenge of mounting Mozart’s brilliant comedy this past spring- an experience which left stage director Matt Boresi and me with a few more gray hairs and perhaps the start of a small ulcer– but also with the deep and lasting satisfaction (which I hope our cast members share) of having surmounted one of the most significant artistic challenges of our lives.
Speaking of significant challenges, what I really want to talk about is the considerable challenge I faced of using modern technology in order to deliver my presentation in the most effective fashion. When I first constructed and submitted my proposal to the N.O.A., I was bound and determined to go analog all the way . . . xeroxed handouts, musical excerpts played from compact disk, and not a single word or image projected on to a screen. My crankiness was due to the countless hours I’ve spent over the years sitting through power point presentations that were absolutely maddening– and not just by students, but even by some faculty colleagues who, in my view, had climbed aboard the latest technological bandwagon merely for the chance to play with another toy. No sir, not for me! I was going to remain a stone knives/ bear skins kind of guy all the way, proud of being old fashioned in my methods and taking perverse and misguided pride in being able to teach without such technological wizardry. . . confident that my communicative skills would carry the day. What was impossible for me to admit to myself is that my reluctance to join the 21st century had (and has) as much to do with chronic laziness and curmudgeonly resistance to change as it does with high-minded ideals. (Much as I hate to admit it.)
For awhile I was perfectly satisfied with my original plan of doing my Portland presentation with nothing remotely resembling technological bells and whistles. . . if for no other reason than to stand out from the crowd. But at some point it dawned on me that to show up with nothing but a pile of notecards and a compact disk might convey the impression that I didn’t care about this opportunity . . . and nothing could be further from the truth. So I asked a couple of my voice students during finals week if they knew anything about (groan) Power Point – or if they could point me to someone who would be a patient tutor. And practically in unison, Max and Nick recommended my faculty colleague and office neighbor Dimitri Shapovalov – but not to learn Power Point, but rather a program called Keynote which they said he uses to spectacular effect in his Music History course.
It took me about a week to scrape up the courage to ask Dimitri for help– not because he isn’t a tremendously kind and generous colleague, but just because it was so humbling to have to approach a colleague and ask for this amount of help . . .where I was starting from Square One (or worse) and needed to gain great proficiency in a very short amount of time. It was asking a lot– especially given that it was Christmas break for both of us– but I finally picked up the phone and called him and was so relieved and touched by his quick and eager willingness to help me. And after two sessions, I am happy to say that my presentation is loaded up in Keynote and ready to go, and barring some catastrophic crash of the electrical grid, I anticipate that tomorrow will go well, and in no small measure because I will walk in the door feeling good about myself and what I have prepared. (And when I think about speaking for listeners who likely know as much about opera as I do, maybe more, confidence is a precious commodity indeed!
As Dimitri took me through the program, I was of course floored by his technical fluidity. (Just watching his fingers dance over the keyboard was amazing.) He knows so much about what the program can do– and whenever he found himself momentarily stymied, he would have the problem solved or the question solved in no time. But beyond all he knows about technology, what was just as valuable and impressive was his exquisite sense of taste– his unerring judgment of what is going to be most helpful in a given situation or setting. The mistake that so many people make (and why I have been turned off by all this stuff) is in loading up their presentations with excess bells and whistles that only get in the way of the core information that is to be conveyed. . . things like filling the screen with words that you end up saying yourself, which tends to make the audience read the screen rather than listen to you . . . or using fancy fonts or making the text dance across the screen or perform any number of fun but ultimately pointless tricks . . . or in general putting too much up on the screen, as though an occasional blank screen is equivalent to dead air on the radio– which it most certainly is not. I suspect that no one is more capable of creating the bells and whistles than Dimitri, but he knows better than to slather them too thickly, too recklessly. Less is often more, and for a neophyte like me, that’s actually wonderful news.
A couple of things jumped out at me as I worked through the program and became more adept at it. One is that I went into this thinking of Keynote as basically a tool by which I could more effectively present my ideas. But I came to realize that it’s also a tool that can help you to better formulate your ideas and give them greater clarity. As I have been putting together the “slides” which will be projected during my presentation, I’ve found myself thinking about my content in a different way – and I also ended up adding to the list of “lessons learned” in the course of our star-crossed Marriage of Figaro production. I had no idea that was going to be the case, and I found that to be tremendously exciting and more than a little humbling as well. And it was also interesting to see how my own standards began to change in terms of the elements that went into my presentation. At the start of our second and final session, when Dimitri took a look at what I had put together, he noticed several photos that were much less clear than some of the others– due to the fact that I had emailed them to myself in order to pull them into the program. (Long story.) He came up with an alternate way of moving those photos without sacrificing any technical quality at all, by posting them on Facebook and then copying and pasting them from there. I let him do that to a couple of the photos that were especially fuzzy looking but told him that a couple of the others were okay, as far as I was concerned. But by the time we were nearing the end of our session, I had changed my tune and wanted every photo to meet that same standard of excellence. Dimitri could have dictated that we change every photo that needed changing – how could I have argued with such a skilled tutor? – but instead allowed me to realize it on my own. And long after he had departing, I was still swapping out so-so photos for better, clearer, or more appropriate images. And as I was doing so, I realized that Dimitri had taken someone who was roughly the skill level of an orangutang when it comes to computers – plus stubborn as a mule to boot – and accomplished quite an impressive transformation. Not that I’m even on the same planet as Dimitri– to his Star Trek I’m still Little House on the Prairie. But I’m learning… growing… and am slowly being dragged into the 21st century of higher education – kicking and screaming at times, but getting there. And that’s thanks in no small measure to my friend and colleague – the “wizard” – Dimitri.
pictured above: I know I have some photos of Dimitri and me playing piano four-hands together, but I couldn’t lay my hands on any of them. So here is a shot of us which is completely staged, in case you couldn’t tell. I could come up with a lot of comical captions, such as “no Dimtri, the notes with the little tails on them are EIGHTH notes, not quarter notes!” or “no, Dimitri, the waltz is in THREE four and the polka is in TWO four” . . . but I don’t think I will. Not after all the help he has given me.