Being Guided by Dreams
Dreaming up goals
The dreaming state of planning a project is often overlooked. Sometimes when we are choosing a project, we're thinking logically or about what purpose it might serve. Dreaming up a fresh new goal, something that will take you a really long time to truly achieve, something you may never achieve, is an important part of setting yourself up to learn something new. Big, juicy dreams are the things that will sustain us in a long term practice. A big dream can last a lifetime, or at least last for a longer stretch of time and help keep you committed and sustained in your personal piano practice.
Having a big dream that you want to work on over the course of time, or the course of your life, doesn't mean that you can't start working towards that dream now. A big dream is self sustaining, and is also evolving. As you start to work on it, you will discover that as your understanding grows, so will your dream. A dream that starts out as, “I want to be able to write my own song,” might turn into “I want to record an entire album.” Sometimes our dreams get more specific rather than more expansive. Maybe instead of, “I want to learn how to play jazz,” it becomes “I want to learn how to transcribe a jazz solo.” Instead of approaching the broadest version of this musical skill, we find more achievable goals to start with.
The funny thing about setting goals, is that as soon as you meet your initial goal, you will dream up a new one instantly and have a new task to try. That's why in addition to envisioning big dreams and working towards them, we need to be sure to celebrate our accomplishments towards those dreams along the way. As we reach steps and milestones that mark our success, we need to make sure we're taking the time to recognize those goals and to celebrate the goals that we've met, even as we're actively setting new ones.
One of the best ways to celebrate your progress towards your big dream is to designate frequent milestones along the way. Something I see often is people setting huge goals, and only working towards those huge goals. They often become frustrated and feel like those goals are getting further away and not closer.
The weird thing about learning something new or expanding your knowledge is that the more that you learn, the worse you think you're doing. The more that we know, the more challenging the tasks we set for ourselves become. So many people struggle to set small bite-sized achievable goals for themselves. That can be accomplished with the help of a private piano teacher, but you do have to try to find something achievable, even easy for yourself, not constantly push yourself to the next step. Pushing yourself is great, even essential in growing as a piano player, but make sure that you're giving yourself something that can sustain you until you meet that larger goal.
Get to Know Your Muses
One way to start dreaming big is to find inspiration in the world around you. I have in the past often overlooked the power of a vision board. There are so many cool ways to make a mood board or vision board it can be a physical space like a wall where you're hanging up pictures or it can be a digital collection of things that inspire you. In music, a playlist can be a vision board of sorts. Think of this phase as a gathering of the muses. You may not even have your large goal in mind yet but you're finding things that inspire you that help drive you towards that larger goal or dream.
Looking for musical inspiration may start in broad strokes. Follow your admiration of a certain musical artist, or a certain style of music. Maybe it’s difficult for you to summarize your interests in that way, but you have a song that you are drawn to and would like to engage with in a more detailed way. Try exploring that song in extreme detail. Learn more about the artist that created that song, or to try to pin down what style of music or genre that song is in and explore that style or genre more. Create an auditory mood board, a playlist that is a landing zone for exploring your different ideas and interests, to decide what you’re drawn to and what inspires you.
If instead of focussing on a single song or style of music, you're doing an exploration of a musical artist, then explore early phases of that artist. What was their first album? Does it sound anything like the song that you like now? Have you listened to their latest album? Is there a single or number one hit that you're not familiar with? Is the song you're listening to the single or number one hit? The next phase with exploring an artist is to find out who their influences and collaborators are.
Music is a social construct, it is not done in a vacuum or an isolation. Music is a product of our society, and the environments around us. Musicians have influences they've had they've had teachers, and they have collaborators over the course of time period. Become an explorer, a historian digging up more details about this artist. Read interviews where your favorite artists talk about the music they listened to when they were a formative player, and what inspired them as a young player. Maybe there's a snippet of a biography describing this material. Look up their discographies, and see who their collaborators were. Sometimes the driving force behind an album or a really incredible song is not actually the front-runner or the the artist singing, but it's the writer, or the instrumentalist recording. You would be amazed that the common thread connecting all of your favorite songs from a period of time are actually that the same bass player is in each band, or that the same writer was collaborating on each track, not the the lead singers that you thought were your favorite musicians. It can be weird or even almost upsetting to pull back the curtain like this but really informative and will help guide your music selections and your dreams and projects.
Calibrating Your Dreams
Once you find out who you really love, what music really drives you, what you would like to engage with in a deeper way, you can start to explore what you want to learn. Just because you love a song doesn't mean that it's something you want to spend a lot of time learning, or that would even be satisfying or fun to play on your instrument. I had a student once tell me, "I want to play rock songs, but rock songs that are actually fun to play on the piano. I don't want to play any more things where you just hold a power chord and that's the whole song.”
They were right you know. It’s not always fun to learn a new song on piano- especially songs that were written specifically with a different instrument in mind. Although that being said, sometimes those are actually more interesting to work on. To figure out how can you create something that sounds good on your instrument might take some imagining. It might take you closing your eyes and listening to the song and thinking- do I like the way this would sound on my instrument? Do I want to spend hours or months or years working on emulating this or internalizing this on my instrument?
Part of choosing something that really inspires you and drives you is finding something that you won't get sick of, or something you're not afraid of getting sick of. We all know that when we listen to our favorite song too many times in a row, it starts to lose its luster. You'll get sick of it you might not want to work on it anymore. So part of finding something that motivates you, finding something that you want to work on for a long time, is choosing something that you won't get sick of period something that will bring you joy and satisfaction and fun. Something that will make you feel like you're really growing and achieving all of your goals. Maybe you're visualizing what it sounds on your instrument may be your scouring the bowels of YouTube looking for videos of other people playing this on your instrument. Maybe you're just browsing sheet music and seeing what it looks like and how it feels to try. Is this a sustainable goal for me, or is this unrealistic? Is this a future goal that I can grow towards, or do I need something I can reach more immediately?
Once you settle on some goals it's important to have music you're listening to this sustains you. Putting together a playlist, or a collecting a collecting a list of artists collaborators influences that remind you of this project, or finding different artists of this styler or genre. This is the beginning of a an audio mood board for you. The next step is finding examples of people working towards your goal or achieving your goal. This might be finding someone on YouTube covering the song. Maybe your goal is not to learn a certain song or style, but it's to be an adept songwriter or to start recording things yourself. Find people who are doing that period this is going to sound ridiculous, but TikTok is a great place to start if you're looking for songwriter or record you think for song writer or recording inspirations. I also think exploring new media like this, is so powerful because you can find diverse representations. If I'm looking up recording artists in my area I'm going to find all white men but one of my favorite TikTok producers that I follow is a young black woman that shares a lot of innovative approaches to recording and shows up behind the scenes look at the gear that she's using. Don't be afraid of the "young peoples" media.
It's amazing to put together a mood board, and place of inspiration, a list of your favorite artists or a playlist of things you'd like to listen to, but it's also important to find your own path in this. What is sustaining or driving for you is probably going to end up looking different. How can you craft your own vision, or your own plan? I'm a big fan of journaling. I think that if you write it out, or explore your ideas, that that can be a great source of envisioning and accountability for yourself. Maybe journaling is not your jam but you are happy to write out an accountability goal. Maybe you're writing it out in a Google doc, maybe you're writing it out in your calendar. Like checking in with yourself in 6 months am I working on my goal? In 2 years did I meet my goal? Work that sounds fun and like a great strategy of accountability come up but it can also be kind of stressful. Our life is more than just our goals, and so it's important to leave space for life to happen around us. Things will happen that we can't plan for and it's important to leave time and space to experience Into respond to those events.
Dream up your goal, and write yourself a loose plan. What's your big goal? In life? In 5 years? In 20 years? What's your more immediate goal, right now that will help you on your journey towards that?
For example, I would like to feel more fluent at jazz improvisation, so for me to have check-ins and accountability right now, I'm working on a jazz transcription. I'm also creating moments in life to perform jazz improvisations, so that I’m not just working on this skill in theory, but I’m utilizing this skill in practice. I won’t become an expert on improvisation overnight, but giving myself a small achievable task that I can practice regularly and come back to again and again helps me take steps towards my long term goal. I also know as I develop my improvisational voice, that it will be a reflection of the music that I consume and taken around me. That's why my jazz transcription is of an artist whose sound I would like to emulate.
Part of my journey towards being better than improvising is also allocating time to independent piano practice, and preparing myself for the accountability moments I have creative. Eventually I will be comfortable playing on the spot and knowing what ideas I want to play with, but I'm returning to standard exercises that I learned as a formative player that I know will help me move forward. I am treating myself as a student and a teacher in this scenario, I'm giving myself lessons that I would give another piano player.
The last piece of this is knowing that I am in a stage along an overarching journey. There will always be people who are better improvisers than me, but I'm actually a pretty good improviser. I need to stop and look at where I started, and where I've come. I was brought up in a classical musical environment, and I have very strong reading skills because of this. I can recognize how far I've come, and how much I've learned since I first started on this journey years and years ago. Something about pausing to recognize where I am on my journey, and what were my strengths lie, is recognizing Where I can merge my strengths and my developing skills. Because I know I'm a strong reader, and I'm a developing improviser, I can improvise using the melody as a template, or I can use strategic harmonic information to inform my improvisation. Because I'm going slow and taking account for my strengths and developing skills, it means that my solos and my improvised melodies will be even more effective and meet my personal objectives, bring me personal satisfaction, because I've taken the time to really develop this skill in detail and in the way that works for me, in a way that I will be able to continue throughout my life, not in a way that will fall away from me if I step away from the habit of practice and focus. My goal is to internalize this skill not to constantly have to work on it to be able to just execute it, but to have it internalized to pull out whenever I need it.
