One Human Minute Archives - Peter Saltzman

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...

OHM #18: Indian Summer

by Peter Saltzman | Aug 2, 2019 | Music, One Human Minute

One Human Minute by Peter Saltzman Indian Summer Better late than never, Better Early than Whenever It was Indian summer I was fearing the fall Of everything related To anything at all Change was coming The shifting air That fought the stillness In summer’s last glare...

Seven Days (OHM #16)

by Peter Saltzman | Jul 11, 2019 | Music, One Human Minute

One Human Minute by Peter Saltzman Seven Days Seven Days in 7/8 Time. Counting, counting, forever counting and counting… Seven Days Counting like a fool Trying to keep it cool Another seven days Winding up the clock Going tick tick tock Another seven days...

OHM Returns

by Peter Saltzman | Jun 24, 2019 | Music, One Human Minute

Harvest Moon The One Minute Songs Return—and not a second too soon! One Human Minute by Peter Saltzman I love my one-minute songs like the brilliant, recalcitrant children they are. But I needed a break from them. And they from me. The universe has a way of telling...

Another Trip Around the Sun

by Peter Saltzman | Jan 7, 2019 | IOTL, One Human Minute

Another Trip Around the SunImprovisations On the Ledge: Episode 2 Ways to...

They Happen Too Fast!

by Peter Saltzman | Oct 4, 2018 | Music, One Human Minute

They Happen Too Fast! Listen to the album... I was convinced that one-minute songs would be the perfect format for an age of decreasing attention spans. I was wrong. Upon listening to the first ten songs of One Human Minute (my album of 60 one-minute songs), one...

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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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