July 2020 - Peter Saltzman

Merged: Painted Music

by Peter Saltzman | Jul 23, 2020 | Piano Sketches

Introducing Piano Sketches Painted music? Underscored painting? Actually both. It’s a different kind of improvised duet where artist Jeremy Harrison improvised a painting to my piano improvisations (Painted Music), or I improvise a piano piece to a video of...

IOTL S2-E7: Planned Chance

by Peter Saltzman | Jul 31, 2020 | IOTL

Planned Chance My intent was to dive into Part 2 of my “End of Melody Episode,“ but by planned chance, I rolled the dice and came up with something completely different. Unplanned, but fated to be this way? Possibly. Almost all improvisation is built upon a kind of...

07/31/2020: To Compose or Improvise?

by Peter Saltzman | Jul 30, 2020 | Featured Track

TRE Jazz Quartet Live 1999 by Peter Saltzman To compose or improvise. That’s the question? Composing and improvising are often thought of as two sides of the same coin. Composition, we say, is written down improvisation. Improvisation is spontaneous composition....

07/29/2020: Trippy 1980s Vibe

by Peter Saltzman | Jul 29, 2020 | Featured Track

Uncollected Pop (Volume 1: 1988-1991) by Peter Saltzman My son, Emanuel, loves the trippy 1980s vibe of this tune. And indeed, when I recorded it back in 1988, that’s what I was going for. Well, not so much the 1980s part as the trippy part. I do love creating...

7/28/20: Long-Form Free Improvisations that Feel Short

by Peter Saltzman | Jul 28, 2020 | Featured Track

Piano Diaries (Volume 1A) by Peter Saltzman Long-form free improvisations tend to…wander, losing their direction like a lost soul blowing with the wind, this way and that. But this improv is focussed. Or at least I say it is. As with the shorter free improv from...

7/27/20: Short Songs that Feel Complete

by Peter Saltzman | Jul 27, 2020 | Featured Track

One Human Minute by Peter Saltzman Short songs that feel complete, that don’t feel like a prelude or set up to something longer are a challenge. Does this one, from my album One Human Minute work? Methinks it does. But then again, I’m using the word...

Track-of-the Day: Indeterminacy

by Peter Saltzman | Jul 26, 2020 | Featured Track

07/26/2020 This track, from my Kabbalah Blues/Quantum Funk (2000) is a kind of -free-for-all study in musical quantum weirdness. Although it is tightly structured around the two themes stated right at the beginning, there are a lot of semi-random clashes between the...

Song of Wrongs (by Saltzman)

by Peter Saltzman | Jul 24, 2020 | Piano Sketches

Visualize Abruptly Changing Tempos Surreal Space The abruptly changing tempos and pitches in Peter’s piece have a huge effect on how I move my brush. It might have been nice to have hit strokes on those high pitched chords but I like what happens with the red lines...

7/24/20: A Highly Melodic Improvisation

by Peter Saltzman | Jul 24, 2020 | Featured Track

This is a good example of highly melodic improvisation. It comes from the first volume of my ongoing and occasional series, Piano Diaries. The challenge for me is to create accessible, relatable improvisations that don’t sound like new age, smooth jazz,...

IOTL S2-E6: The End of Melody, Pt. 1

by Peter Saltzman | Jul 16, 2020 | IOTL, Piano

Melody. As a creative musician, you’re either born with it or not. Or maybe everybody is born with it but some choose to suppress it. Why would anybody do that? Whatever the reason, non-melodic music almost always lacks narrative. This is true whether it’s...

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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