May 2020 - Peter Saltzman

IOTL S2-E4: Maximal Minimalism: Me v. Philip Glass

by Peter Saltzman | May 26, 2020 | IOTL, Piano

In this episode, I do battle with Philip Glass and, by extension, the entire genre of minimalism. To my surprise, though, I found that even while I reject the aesthetic as a whole, there’s plenty I can take from it creatively—but only by adapting some of its...

IOTL S2-E3: Everything is Related To Everything Else (Again)

by Peter Saltzman | May 15, 2020 | IOTL, Piano

If you’ve been composing and/or improvising for long enough, you will no doubt encounter the inescapable reality that you can’t create music in a vacuum, that every phrase you write/play is somehow connected to what someone else (or you) created in the past. In this...

IOTL S2-E2: The Seinfeld Episode

by Peter Saltzman | May 10, 2020 | IOTL

I was watching Jerry Seinfeld’s new standup release on Netflix the other night and it put me in the mind of nothing. Specifically, how we build music out of essentially meaningless sound events that end up adding up to…something? Music: Scale Scale...

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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