Piano Sketches Archives - Peter Saltzman

Dark Morning, Take 1

by Peter Saltzman | Sep 15, 2020 | Piano Sketches

Painterly Space in Time Torrents of Rivulets With the low, slow, and even rhythm opening Peter’s piece I build the image from the bottom up with mostly large dark marks leading to the first high trill, which I am able to hit on cue with a burst from the canned air gun...

Merged: Painted Music

by Peter Saltzman | Jul 23, 2020 | Piano Sketches

Introducing Piano Sketches Painted music? Underscored painting? Actually both. It’s a different kind of improvised duet where artist Jeremy Harrison improvised a painting to my piano improvisations (Painted Music), or I improvise a piano piece to a video of...

Dark Blues Landscape

by Peter Saltzman | Aug 12, 2020 | Piano Sketches

Intuiting the Musical Subtext Painting Figuratively Although this is the fourth color painting done with watercolor on plastic Yupo paper, it is my first attempt at painting figuratively to Peter’s music. Here the main challenge for me is to complete a (somewhat)...

Minimalist Blues in Black and White

by Peter Saltzman | Aug 14, 2020 | Piano Sketches

Minimal Blues in Black and White Buddha Board Takes Beating You will notice in this video-painting that the Buddha Board has taken a beating, the result of numerous experiments with tools for manipulating the medium. I learned that things like metal palette knives can...

Poppy Asymmetric Bounce

by Peter Saltzman | Aug 26, 2020 | Piano Sketches

Trippy 1970s Vibe Prepping for Paint I find myself recording these improvisations with Jeremy in mind. As in, what would a painter do with this? Specifically, I wanted to give him something rhythmic to mess with. And more poppy. The aAsymmetric part, which you can...

Scaling the Arpeggiated Heights

by Peter Saltzman | Aug 26, 2020 | Piano Sketches

The Afterlife of a Paint Stroke Afterlife After what I considered a failure to work with color on traditional watercolor paper (the process is slow), I remembered that tucked away in a drawer in my studio was a pad of plastic Yupo paper. This turns out to work very...

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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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