Nocturne #1-A Cinematic Scene
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“Nocturne #1-A Cinematic Scene” was composed for a movie scene. While paying homage to the Chopin Nocturnes, it’s written in a modern musical language.
"Nocturne #1-A Cinematic Scene" was composed for a movie scene. While paying homage to the Chopin Nocturnes, it's written in a modern musical language.
This nocturne started its life as a submission for a movie sync licensing cue. For better or worse, it wasn't chosen for that job—and I think I know why: it's too complex for the kind of sad, bereft scene it was supposed to underscore. Or maybe it's just too sad—or not underscore-ish enough.
I have written some film music, but I have an essential problem with the medium (not film but underscoring.) The problem is that film music is generally meant to be background. I'm a foreground type of composer, always needing to impose my artistic will on the world. The one thing I notice about most film music is that it doesn't stand too well on its merits. I mean out of the context for which it is composed—to support the film.
This nocturne stands on its own.
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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