IOTL Archives - Peter Saltzman

S3-E4: Themes Alive—Musical Structure from One Note!

by Peter Saltzman | Nov 19, 2021 | IOTL, Music

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,...

IOTL S3-E3: The Theme Dream Machine

by Peter Saltzman | Nov 3, 2021 | IOTL, Music

Musical themes seem to emerge from the sonic abyss almost by their own volition. But where do they come from? Are they elusive attempts to describe the moment? State of musical mind? Emotion translated into sound? Or are they just, as I discussed in the previous...

IOTL S3-E2: The Many Layers of Musical Memory—and Forgetting

by Peter Saltzman | Oct 23, 2021 | IOTL

Summary An episode about how listening to music, and performing it, are really acts of thematic memory—and forgetting. And sometimes the forgetting is part of the creative process. Or maybe it’s just forgetting. In any case, I take a deep dive into the many...

IOTL S3-E1: Theme is the Theme

by Peter Saltzman | Oct 10, 2021 | IOTL

Summary: After an extended layoff, I’ve decided to get back to Improvisations On the Ledge by sticking to the theme—literally. The entire season—including this episode—is devoted to musical theme: how we create, perceive it, and make music out of it. Show Notes...

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...

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...

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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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