Dreams...

[chopinrules2005]

I have a desire to compose. I have great music in my mind that I am unable to play due to my lack of perfect pitch and technique. I hear things that I wish I could convey. I get lucky sometimes with Noteworthy Composer, but for the most part I feel hindered by my lack of formal training.

I've had dreams where I had no physical hindrance and I was sitting at a grand piano just letting loose of all the great music. It felt SO real. I actually saw my hands moving over the keyboard...

What I am wondering is this: The human brain is so amazing that maybe what I see in my dream as being played is actually what would be produced by the piano in real life had my hands actually passed over the keys in my dream. (Weird huh??)

Have any of you folks had any similar experiences? I also had a dream where someone played the 3rd mov. of Moonlight Sonata in front of me perfectly and it was quite emotionally moving!

Do any of you guys also believe that music is somewhat of an energy that is channelled through certain people? How do people come up with such sounds?

[ted]

"I have great music in my mind that I am unable to play due to my lack of perfect pitch and technique"

Perfect pitch doesn't matter for creative purposes and technique can be learned. From the content of your dreams I suggest you commence regular improvising as soon as possible, learning whatever you need as you go along. The dreams might be your unconscious telling you that you are more capable than you think !

[chopinrules2005]

That is what I was thinking. See when I say perfect pitch what I am trying to say is that if I could relate what I hear in my mind to the piano then it'd be no problem to 'transcribe' my mind's music... or something.

I do sit down and improvise a lot. I've impressed a lot of people, but it is hard to notate those things. It is also laziness in a way.

Thanks for your response! I hope to hear of other similar dreams.

[ted]

Other people tell me I am selfish and lazy in this regard too but I ignore them. Was Ferdinand Morton lazy because he just improvised ? Is Keith Jarrett lazy ? Was Art Tatum ? I don't think so. When takes me an hour to write out even a crude approximation to a few seconds of improvisation I am certainly ill inclined to worry about pleasing either contemporaries or posterity. I record a lot, so if it's really that good someone else can transcribe it after I'm dead !

[Sketchee]

You must have heard all the great stories people tell here on the forum about how Beethoven and Liszt improvised.  It's was once standard for classically trained instrumentalists to improvise.  It's a good tool, take advantage of it.

If you feel you can't be lazy and compose and you've identified this as a problem, this is an area you should work on.  If you feel it's a hinderance to not have the technical skill, then you'll have to gain some grasp of that. You don't need perfect technique, but at least enough understanding of technique to be able to direct a pianist to be able to.  You don't need perfect pitch, but you can practice note recognition to the point where it'll be useful if that's something you want.

As for Noteworthy, I love that program. I just write sometimes a few incomplete measures and sometimes long full thought out pieces in form.  If you want to compose, you'll have to basically follow Nike's advice and "Just do it".  There are all kinds of reasons we can come up with not to do something, but that's useless. Find a way around them.  Write in the program and at the piano as much as you can, read on composing online and in books, etc.   Even if it's just an hour or two a day and what you make isn't a masterpiece right away, there's a lot to be learned by doing.

[CC]

Technique and perfect pitch can be learned rather quickly.  See link below.  Why not start right away? In that link, go to Chapter 3, section 5, for dreams.