Words Archives - Peter Saltzman

IOTL S2-E5: The (Un)Quantifiable Mystery of Music

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...

IOTL #21: A Minimal Take on Minimalism

by Peter Saltzman | Aug 5, 2019 | Aesthetic Scholarship, IOTL, Music, Words

I never much cared for minimalism until I minimally did. To get right to the point… To get right to the point… To get right to the point… I never much cared for the style of music music music music musi mus mu called minimalism ...

IOTL #20: Giant Steps (Small Thinking)

by Peter Saltzman | Jul 31, 2019 | Aesthetic Scholarship, IOTL, Music, Words

In which I do battle with the almost perfect symmetry in John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” to try to create something a little messy and asymmetrical. Have you ever listened to a piece of music that impressed you on its technical merits but left you cold? This happens to...

IOTL #18: Nocturne out of Context

by Peter Saltzman | Jul 15, 2019 | IOTL, Music, Stateless Art, Words

In an era when musical context has been subsumed in a sea of listener playlists, on-demand streaming and the general obsolescence of the album, who creates the larger context for a single piece of music? You do! Until I do. Composers, songwriters, and performers of a...

#17-The Bottle Episode

by Peter Saltzman | Jul 8, 2019 | Aesthetic Scholarship, IOTL, Piano

The episode in which anything can happen but mostly doesn’t… In episodic television (Seinfeld, Friends, etc.), a bottle episode is one in which the writers mostly take leave of the regular format, opting for a cheaply produced, one-set show that often...

#15-Avant-Garde for Wimps (Like Me)

by Peter Saltzman | Jul 1, 2019 | Appreciation/Depreciation, IOTL

I’ll never dive fully into the avant-garde, but dipping my feet in that pool can be quite exhilarating! (transcription below) In episode #13, Avant-Garde Jazz for Dummies, I spoke about how avant-garde music plays a behind-the-scenes, supporting role in much of...

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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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