A Podcast That Deconstructs the Story Inside of the Music
“Improvisations on The Ledge is a must for musicians, composers, music fans, artists, and indeed anyone with an interest in and appreciation for organic music and creative expression in their purest forms.”
Rebecca Cullen
Stereo Stickman
IOTL is a kind of performance art. In each episode, Saltzman tackles a particular subject—a genre, music trends, problems creative musicians face—and the riffs on it with both words and improvised piano music.
Peter draws on his extensive background and knowledge in multiple genres: jazz, classical, pop, and more. But IOTL is not a lecture; it’s a creative deep dive into the soul of music.
Improvisations on the Ledge is not just about music. It is music.
Episodes:
S3-E4: Themes Alive—Musical Structure from One Note!
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,...
IOTL S3-E3: The Theme Dream Machine
Musical themes seem to emerge from the sonic abyss almost by their own volition. But where do they come from? Are they elusive attempts to describe the moment? State of musical mind? Emotion translated into sound? Or are they just, as I discussed in the previous...
IOTL S3-E2: The Many Layers of Musical Memory—and Forgetting
Summary An episode about how listening to music, and performing it, are really acts of thematic memory—and forgetting. And sometimes the forgetting is part of the creative process. Or maybe it's just forgetting. In any case, I take a deep dive into the many layers of...
IOTL S3-E1: Theme is the Theme
Summary: After an extended layoff, I've decided to get back to Improvisations On the Ledge by sticking to the theme—literally. The entire season—including this episode—is devoted to musical theme: how we create, perceive it, and make music out of it. Show Notes After...
IOTL S2-E8: Rearview Mirror
Using jazz educator David Bloom’s metaphor, musicians need to look in the rearview mirror and remember the theme if they wish to move forward. But when you look back, you are not just remembering what you played at the beginning of an improvisation—you’re remembering all of that music that got you to the point of even being able to look back in the first place.
IOTL S2-E7: Planned Chance
My plan was to dive into Part 2 of my “End of Melody Episode,“ but by chance, I rolled the dice and came up with something completely different. Unplanned, but fated to be this way? Possibly.
IOTL S2-E6: The End of Melody, Pt. 1
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?
IOTL S2-E5: The (Un)Quantifiable Mystery of Music
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 possible?
IOTL S2-E4: Maximal Minimalism: Me v. Philip Glass
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 techniques in ways never intended by its practitioners.
IOTL S2-E3: Everything is Related To Everything Else (Again)
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 episode, I explore how, like it or not, those connections randomly occur—and what you creatively do with them.
IOTL S2-E2: The Seinfeld Episode
I was watching Jerry Seinfeld’s new standup release on Netflix the other night and it put me in the mind of nothing. Or how we build music out of essentially meaningless sound events that end up adding up to…something?
IOTL S2-E1: CoVideous Improvisations on Covert Thoughts
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 elephant in the world-sized room: CoVid-19. The central theme of this episode, then, is how the crisis changes the way we go about making art—if at all.