IOTL Archives - Page 3 of 7

IOTL Season Two About to Launch

by Peter Saltzman | Apr 3, 2020 | IOTL, Music

It’s been a LONG wait, but season two is just about ready to launch. With an exciting new format and several new features, it will be well worth the wait! Coming April 15th…or thereabouts. Follow Me: Podcast Homepage Subscribe on Apple Podcasts Bandcamp...

IOTL #28: A Variation on Theme and Variations

by Peter Saltzman | Dec 20, 2019 | IOTL, Music, Piano

What if I came up with a theme in the morning, then improvised variations throughout the day? What would that add up to? Call it a variation on the theme and variations idea, but in the form of a diary of a single day in the life of Peter Saltzman. Like the Sonata...

IOTL #27: What Not To Think When Improvising

by Peter Saltzman | Dec 6, 2019 | IOTL, Music, Piano

Do you ever think about what you’re thinking about? Of course, you do. I often think about what I’m thinking about when improvising. But when I pose this question to the great French pianist-composer Jean-Michel Pilc in this episode, his answer is along the lines...

IOTL #26: The Improvised Sonata

by Peter Saltzman | Nov 25, 2019 | IOTL, Piano

For years I’ve had this thought that I should be able to improvise a full 4-movement piano sonata. Is this just another example of me being completely out of touch with my times? Well yes. But that doesn’t mean it won’t work. As I mentioned in episode 22 (“Improvising...

IOTL Short #6: And a Plane Flew By

by Peter Saltzman | Oct 23, 2019 | IOTL, Music, Piano

…Or how musical order insists on materializing out of seemingly random occurrences… A random musical thought occurs while parking the car, which circuitously leads me to a final chord at precisely the moment when a plane flies by in the same exact key. I...

IOTL #25: Improvisations with Play-by-Play Analysis!

by Peter Saltzman | Oct 21, 2019 | IOTL, Music

Yes, that’s right, improvisations with sports-style play-by-play analysis—including instant replay! (Where else but on IOTL..) It may seem like a sacrilege of sorts to do an analysis of my own improvisations, thus robbing of some supposedly idealize pure, unfettered...

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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.

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.

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