September 2020 - Peter Saltzman

The Song in Between

by Peter Saltzman | Sep 30, 2020 | Featured Track, Uncategorized

Peter Saltzman · The Song In Between-09_16_2020 Lyrical Improvisation The song in between what? In between all of the other non-song stuff that happens? That can’t be it because I really think of all my improvisations as extended songs—tunes that go beyond...

Dark Morning, Take 1

by Peter Saltzman | Sep 15, 2020 | Piano Sketches

Painterly Space in Time Torrents of Rivulets With the low, slow, and even rhythm opening Peter’s piece I build the image from the bottom up with mostly large dark marks leading to the first high trill, which I am able to hit on cue with a burst from the canned air gun...

Jazz Counterpoint 101

by Peter Saltzman | Sep 5, 2020 | Sheet Music

About This Work I composed this piece in 2007 as a challenge to myself—could I write a convincing piece of music for piano with just two voices? There were other limitations, expectations, and general rules involved. Most importantly, it had to be in a contemporary...

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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