August 2020 - Peter Saltzman

Beginner Blues Variations for Piano

by Peter Saltzman | Aug 31, 2020 | Sheet Music

When I started giving my older daughter piano lessons when she was about four-years-old, I was convinced that she needed to start with the blues. Many years later, having subsequently taught several young children (in this case, I am paid to do so,) I’m not so...

Hello, Keith Jarrett

by Peter Saltzman | Aug 29, 2020 | Featured Track

Best of Piano Diaries by Peter Saltzman I was with either my ex-girlfriend or my dad when I first went to a Keith Jarrett concert. Either way, she was there, which may be the reason why it was also the last. I should go again. I was 15—beginning my sophomore year in...

Dark Blues Landscape

by Peter Saltzman | Aug 12, 2020 | Piano Sketches

Intuiting the Musical Subtext Painting Figuratively Although this is the fourth color painting done with watercolor on plastic Yupo paper, it is my first attempt at painting figuratively to Peter’s music. Here the main challenge for me is to complete a (somewhat)...

Minimalist Blues in Black and White

by Peter Saltzman | Aug 14, 2020 | Piano Sketches

Minimal Blues in Black and White Buddha Board Takes Beating You will notice in this video-painting that the Buddha Board has taken a beating, the result of numerous experiments with tools for manipulating the medium. I learned that things like metal palette knives can...

Poppy Asymmetric Bounce

by Peter Saltzman | Aug 26, 2020 | Piano Sketches

Trippy 1970s Vibe Prepping for Paint I find myself recording these improvisations with Jeremy in mind. As in, what would a painter do with this? Specifically, I wanted to give him something rhythmic to mess with. And more poppy. The aAsymmetric part, which you can...

Scaling the Arpeggiated Heights

by Peter Saltzman | Aug 26, 2020 | Piano Sketches

The Afterlife of a Paint Stroke Afterlife After what I considered a failure to work with color on traditional watercolor paper (the process is slow), I remembered that tucked away in a drawer in my studio was a pad of plastic Yupo paper. This turns out to work very...

Peter Paints Sound to Image

by Peter Saltzman | Aug 10, 2020 | Piano Sketches

Translate Images to Sound Me First This is the first Buddha Board video-painting done without listening to Peter’s music. Instead, Peter responds to my work. With the experience I had recently gained painting to music, here, I try to paint at a somewhat rhythmic pace....

Chambers 1

by Peter Saltzman | Aug 25, 2020 | Piano Sketches

Viewing a Painting in Time Painting with traditional materials My decision to revisit painting with traditional cold press watercolor paper for this video is partly driven by the materials at hand during a recent visit to the Adirondacks. The previous evening I had...

Introducing Piano Sketches

by Peter Saltzman | Aug 23, 2020 | News

Painted Music? Underscored Painting? Actually Both! Backstory Early in 2020, Jeremy Harrison contacts me out of the blue on Instagram. We last saw each other in 1981, but I remembered him instantly. At that time, 39 years ago, I was studying (briefly) at Indiana...

Two Fisted Painting (and Piano)

by Peter Saltzman | Aug 21, 2020 | Piano Sketches

Painting a Fugue Dance of Color I worked for hours trying to get something to work with this piece. Although this is my best result, I wasn’t initially satisfied with it and didn’t send it to Peter for several days. The quick contrasting changes in the music seem to...

« Older Entries

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.

Leave a comment and share your thoughts: https://open.firstory.me/story/ckw6kzm991rm90878rsjk4zli?m=comment

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.

Follow