Music 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...

One Minute Songs Still Trying to Add Up To An Hour

by Peter Saltzman | Oct 24, 2021 | Featured Album, Music, One Human Minute

No Time Like the… When I began time-releasing this album of one-minute songs in 2018, I proposed to get it done in a year. Boy was I wrong! 60 0ne-minute songs may seem doable in a year’s time—and in fact I completed the writing in primary production for...

Imaginary Dialogues, Part 1: Keith Jarrett

by Peter Saltzman | Oct 24, 2021 | Featured Track, Music

Peter Saltzman · Signifying White Man 4 15 PM The Musicians in My Head This track comes from an album is “in the works.” I’m still culling through several tracks to not only see what fits, but what fits together collectively. In the meantime…...

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...

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...

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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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