by Peter Saltzman | Jul 16, 2020 | IOTL, Piano
Melody. As a creative musician, you’re either born with it or not. Or maybe everybody is born with it but some choose to suppress it. Why would anybody do that? Whatever the reason, non-melodic music almost always lacks narrative. This is true whether it’s...
by Peter Saltzman | Jun 18, 2020 | IOTL, Piano, Words
Math, science, and logic can explain a lot but not everything about how music works. The strange thing, though, is that great music almost always has a perfect logic to it. How is that...
by Peter Saltzman | May 26, 2020 | IOTL, Piano
In this episode, I do battle with Philip Glass and, by extension, the entire genre of minimalism. To my surprise,  though, I found that even while I reject the aesthetic as a whole, there’s plenty I can take from it creatively—but only by adapting some of its...
by Peter Saltzman | May 15, 2020 | IOTL, Piano
If you’ve been composing and/or improvising for long enough, you will no doubt encounter the inescapable reality that you can’t create music in a vacuum, that every phrase you write/play is somehow connected to what someone else (or you) created in the past. In this...
by Peter Saltzman | Apr 23, 2020 | IOTL, Music, Piano
Trailer for S2-E1… Season Two is finally here but it’s not at all was I was planning. Befitting the title of the podcast, Improvisations on the Ledge, in fact, resists any serious planning. And yet, for this premiere episode of season two, I can’t avoid the...
by Peter Saltzman | Mar 2, 2020 | Music, Piano Diaries
Piano Diaries: 2 : February 2020 by Peter Saltzman It occurs to me, as I record these random tracks, that what I’m really doing is documenting my state of mind throughout the day, week, month. And of course, one’s state of mind is influenced by many factors, internal...