August 2020 - Page 2 of 2 - Peter Saltzman

IOTL S2-E8: Rearview Mirror

by Peter Saltzman | Aug 14, 2020 | IOTL

Remember the Theme Using jazz educator David Bloom’s metaphor, musicians need to look in the rearview mirror and remember the theme if they wish to move forward. But when you look back, you are not just remembering what you played at the beginning of an...

Timlessly Unhip Pop Songs

by Peter Saltzman | Aug 12, 2020 | Featured Album

Uncollected Songs, Vol. 2 (2001-2005) by Peter Saltzman Eternally Undead J.S. Bach wrote timelessly unhip music. Toward the end of his life, Bach was considered dated, and a little boring—even by his talented composer sons. Oh sure, people (including the sons)...

Anatomy of a Badass Bob Dylan Cover

by Peter Saltzman | Aug 4, 2020 | Featured Track

Or Why Most Covers Don’t Uncover Anything New Unollected Pop (Volume 2: 2001-2005) by Peter Saltzman This is my badass cover of the Bob Dylan classic, Blowing In The Wind. The original idea for the groove and pedal-point in the bass came when I was...

08/01/2020: Not by Danny Elfman

by Peter Saltzman | Aug 1, 2020 | Featured Track

Big Ass Orchestral Cues by Peter Saltzman Not by Danny Elfman This track is not by Danny Elfman. You remember Danny Elfman. He wrote several dark noirish movie scores for Batman films and the like back in the 1990s. Also Spiderman 2, and others. Like me, he’s also a...

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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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