Funny thing, creativity.

It is possible to recognise it when it arises, however like the words "Love", "Spirit" and "respect" it is so over-used as to have little meaning.

One of the principles of visual art (only one) is that the artist needs to be more aware of the space around a subject, very often, than the subject itself and this does not just apply to representational art - be it a digital image, stone, paint, wood - it applies to all visual arts. For an analogous reason this writing will circle and weave its way around the subject, creativity, rather than attempt to define it just like that, as Tommy Cooper would say...

So this begins with what creativity is not.

It has nothing to do with self. The Andy Warhol nightmare of 15 minutes of fame has come to pass for quite a few people, and it is mostly ephemeral rubbish. The people involved are attention seekers, shallow, mostly uninteresting.

More than this, a person who has wowed audiences with the virtuosity of their fingers upon a keyboard is not necessarily creative. With enough skill he or she could be thinking of a shopping list, an argument or having a sexual fantasy whilst transmitting nothing of any value to their audience. It happens every day.

Art may involve skill and virtuosity, but not necessarily so. There are greatly skilled musicians, famous pop singers, for example, who ooze and gush with mock feeling, who use their skills to titillate the lower emotions of young people - for obvious reasons I cannot name them in print - when they could just as easily forget the chart-making money making machine of mediocrity. There are writers, like journalists, who use techniques like the one I have just used in a self-conscious form of journalese, a sound bite of alliteration or some other device to capture an attention of the moment, to stimulate a coarse response. To impress.

There may also be skills that cannot be defined so easily. Like the ability to put an essence into a work, of any kind, that then can live within the recipient. I believe the ancients understood this better than we.

In the last two centuries Art that was often dismissed as "folk-art" or "mere ceremonial" drawing upon archetypal imagery or superstition was often much finer than the greatest symphony in the world presented by a merely technically accomplished group and conductor. There is a nightmare world of comparison and wiseacreing that you can read on, for example U-Tube by aficionados of a particular musical genre. Some of it is expressed in clever musical technicalities, some merely in pompous self-important opinions, but notice how much of it is pure excrement of the self-important brain.

As I write this, I am listening to the third movement of Beethoven's 9th symphony, the adagio or slow movement before the gigantic drama of the final movement with the more famous choral ending i the first of the BBC Proms 2007. On the text notes available with digital some intellectual idiot is describing the changes in the movement as if it were a technical matter, so he calls one theme developing out of another a "contrast", as if it were a technique that Beethoven were inventing to entertain his or her brain. It is not a contrast, it is not "an idea", it is one of the most holistic pieces I have ever heard written - each part whether in three or four time, plucked or strummed, bowed or echoed, underlaid with this or that, is of one piece. It is a whole. Would he describe a Renaissance painting in little fragmented pieces as if it were a mosaic and not an entire canvass?

Art is no more the province of the intellectual or the well-educated than it is of the self-conscious deconstructionalist or revolutionary. But further than this I can also hear with my heart that the conductor does not understand, because he is not feeling the way the piece hangs together. He is obeying the score, no doubt, faultlessly, but I have heard it really played with the fluency it is such a fine example of, not in any intellectual sense but because it transports me, alters my state, uplifts me, not into some blimpish constricted emotion or some mushy sentimentality, but into a higher or different state of being. Listen to Herbert Von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic by contrast.

One of the problems is that once a person has no experience of the presence of essence within art then they cannot recognise the absence of it. When I was a child people listened to "Light Music" - there was even a BBC Radio station called The Light Programme. Mushy peas and mash for the masses (see how easy it is to write crap to entertain and "sound good"?). But this was not music, this was wallpaper, music while you work or daydream. It was sickening and insulting to my natural inborn sensibilities - sensibilities which are not the result of familiarisation or cultural influence but those that can be found by any child who is given the chance to find and develop them.

So it is so easy to fool people who have not experienced true essence art into thinking that because something can be highly stimulating or make a deep impression that it is art. A crude home-made bomb has both these qualities, and if you think that could be classified as art then please stop reading.

By the same token what is being said is that there is also art involved in being able to experience. To hear, to see, to ingest the essence, to even notice it. I cannot tolerate listening to a fine performance whilst listening to the sounds of people getting drunk. I have to focus the best of myself, I have to tunnel my hearing, sharpen my attention, increase the unconscious vectors of defiance in my blood to experience the true value of the performance. It happened on the first celebration of being able to breathe more easily, parts of which I reviewed. I still enjoyed it, but it cost me a great deal of energy to burn off the incidental noises.

I have been fortunate enough to meet more than one essence artist. There are many involved with Healthy Concerts, not least the founder who is all essence, all in the now, or totally unhappy. That may be why some of them have preferred the intimate salon concert to larger venues. It is very difficult sometimes. One of the most difficult media of expression is the written word because it is so easy to be seduced into writing in a way that is not true to oneself. I have to admit writing this is a struggle because this is prose. It is so literal. It is so easy to sound like a journalist or intellectual. It is so easy to over explain because there is no-one listening or reading at the moment of its emergence. It's a bitch.

By way of finishing on a deliberately incomplete note, for like the Zen teacher I cannot believe in the possibility of fully completing this essay (how arrogant would that be?), I wish to tell a story of a meeting with a remarkable woman, and yes, the word association is deliberate in this case although I did not plan it, a Great Lady whom I met in the mid-sixties, I think. She was training to be a pianist and in her late teens attained a remarkable standard and a gift, but then, at the age of eighteen she fell off her piano stool into the orchestra pit and broke her hip. This, hip replacements being still at least half a century away, finished her career as a concert pianist, but she had been trained in a direct line going back to Franz Liszt himself. Hand to hand, swaying body to swaying body, ear to mouth, mouth to ear with possibly the greatest pianist of all time. She taught piano though.

She did not teach children scales, as Liszt did not. She understood the language, the phrases, the sentences, the clauses and subordinate clauses, the prayers and celebrations, the despair and the joys of music. She spoke the language of music more fluently than anyone I have ever heard play. Even Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis and other true greats.

She called her audience of professional musicians "technicians and mathematicians" in her angry Austrian accent. She stomped to the front of a stage on the South Bank of London and roasted the hell out of an audience of professional musicians.

But when her students, and at one point she herself played the piano it was not a percussion instrument. The music somehow came out of the air all around us. It was magic. It was music. It was life itself.

The most creative person I know? You are sitting, standing, walking, running or lying on her right now.