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Peter Paints Sound to Image

by Peter Saltzman | Aug 10, 2020 | Piano Sketches

Translate Images to Sound Me First This is the first Buddha Board video-painting done without listening to Peter’s music. Instead, Peter responds to my work. With the experience I had recently gained painting to music, here, I try to paint at a somewhat rhythmic pace....

Chambers 1

by Peter Saltzman | Aug 25, 2020 | Piano Sketches

Viewing a Painting in Time Painting with traditional materials My decision to revisit painting with traditional cold press watercolor paper for this video is partly driven by the materials at hand during a recent visit to the Adirondacks. The previous evening I had...

Two Fisted Painting (and Piano)

by Peter Saltzman | Aug 21, 2020 | Piano Sketches

Painting a Fugue Dance of Color I worked for hours trying to get something to work with this piece. Although this is my best result, I wasn’t initially satisfied with it and didn’t send it to Peter for several days. The quick contrasting changes in the music seem to...

Song of Wrongs (by Saltzman)

by Peter Saltzman | Jul 24, 2020 | Piano Sketches

Visualize Abruptly Changing Tempos Surreal Space The abruptly changing tempos and pitches in Peter’s piece have a huge effect on how I move my brush. It might have been nice to have hit strokes on those high pitched chords but I like what happens with the red lines...

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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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