June 2019 - Peter Saltzman

#14-Sad Movie Theme Goes Bad

by Peter Saltzman | Jun 24, 2019 | IOTL

A Very Promising Theme Written for a Sad Scene in a Movie…What Could Possibly Go Wrong? (transcription below) I’ve written a few movie scores and had a few tracks placed on TV shows. What I’ve come to learn, though, is that due to my musical ego,...

OHM Returns

by Peter Saltzman | Jun 24, 2019 | Music, One Human Minute

Harvest Moon The One Minute Songs Return—and not a second too soon! One Human Minute by Peter Saltzman I love my one-minute songs like the brilliant, recalcitrant children they are. But I needed a break from them. And they from me. The universe has a way of telling...

IOTL #13: The “Avant Garde Jazz For Dummies” Episode

by Peter Saltzman | Jun 18, 2019 | IOTL

You may hate the avant-garde but, dammit, you need it more than you think. (transcription below) The musical Avant-Garde in general and Avant-Garde jazz, in particular, have either misleading or no connotations at all for most listeners (and non-listeners.) Say the...

#12: The Emperor Has New Clothes

by Peter Saltzman | Jun 10, 2019 | IOTL

Ways to Listen: A bluesy improvisation on the theme from the slow movement of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto inevitably leads me down the path of noninevitability. (transcription below) But why did it lead me back to Leonard Bernstein for the 2nd episode out of...

Episode #11: Art ± Technology = Art

by Peter Saltzman | Jun 6, 2019 | IOTL

Ways to Listen: My recording equipment was flipping out (or maybe It was me). Which may seem like a hindrance to artistic expression but then I realized that the flipping out was part of the flipping art! (transcription below) I’m trying out a new audio...

Episode #10: This is A Blues?

by Peter Saltzman | Jun 3, 2019 | IOTL

Ways to Listen: I Try to Write a Blues That Doesn’t Really Sound Like A Blues…but only if You’ve Already Decided What A Blues Sounds Like (transcription below) What is a blues? A genre? Musical form? A scale? It’s all of those things and more...

Improvisations on the Ledge

Improvisations on The Ledge

In “Improvisations on the Ledge,” award-winning composer-pianist Peter Saltzman searches for universal truths by stumbling upon them—both with words and music. The basic premise is simple: he improvises on the piano, then talks about what the music tells him. Then makes music about what the talking tells him. Then…well, it goes on like this. Droll, funny, dramatic, musical, short.

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The moment a theme is stated, it wants to do something. What? Like all lifeforms, it wants to replicate, mutate, transform…become something. That something is musical structure.

How we get from a single note to a theme (motif), to a full-blown musical structure (song, free improvisation, symphony) is seemingly a mystery. And yet it’s not.

Due to a naturally occurring acoustical phenomenon known as the overtone series, one note is not actually one note—there are in fact many notes vibrating above the single note (the fundamental) we think we’re hearing exclusively.

But consciously or not, we have an innate awareness of those other notes, the overtones that ring out from the fundamental. And that awareness, at some point in human history, led us to pluck those notes out of the air, string them together into themes.

And then what did we do? We repeated those motifs, and they become something larger. First simple melodies. Then, as we repeated, we varied: shifted a pitch here, altered the rhythm there, played the motivic idea from another starting point in the scale.

In no time (though nobody knows how many centuries or millennia “no time” took to unfold) we had the beginnings of musical structure.
Music exists in time, evolves in time. As soon as you repeat something over time, and then vary it, you are effectively creating an incipient structure—whether you intend to or not.

At some point in musical history, humans began to mean it—to order notes intentionally. But that intention always leads back to one note which has within it the potential to become all notes—themes, melodies, songs, and larger structures.

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