August 2019 - Peter Saltzman

#IOTL 22—Improvising Classical Music: Is That a Thing?

by Peter Saltzman | Aug 27, 2019 | IOTL, Piano

Back in the day, the great classical composers were brilliant improvisers. Are they still? Is it even possible? When I was 17 and still in the throes of my love affair with jazz, I came upon a passage in a biography about J.S. Bach that really messed with my head. I...

IOTL #21: A Minimal Take on Minimalism

by Peter Saltzman | Aug 5, 2019 | Aesthetic Scholarship, IOTL, Music, Words

I never much cared for minimalism until I minimally did. To get right to the point… To get right to the point… To get right to the point… I never much cared for the style of music music music music musi mus mu called minimalism ...

OHM #18: Indian Summer

by Peter Saltzman | Aug 2, 2019 | Music, One Human Minute

One Human Minute by Peter Saltzman Indian Summer Better late than never, Better Early than Whenever It was Indian summer I was fearing the fall Of everything related To anything at all Change was coming The shifting air That fought the stillness In summer’s last glare...

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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