Improvisations on The Ledge: Recent Episodes
PETER SALTZMAN
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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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 episode, a form of musical memory (and forgetting.)
After working through this episode, I must admit that while the provenance of musical themes seems to be some combination of all of the above, in the end, they remain somewhat elusive. Melodic ghosts in the machine of our minds.
What I do know is that musical themes want to emerge from the sonic abyss. Like everything else in the universe, order wants to emerge from chaos. This is how life happens. And music.
Which leads me to my next episode: how do musical structures naturally emerge from themes?
Music Performed or Referenced:
Que Sera, Sera
Fly Me to Moon
Suite for Jazz Quartet Live (midroll and tag music): https://petersaltzman.bandcamp.com/album/tre-jazz-quartet-live-1999
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"The Many Layers of Musical Memory—and Forgetting" is 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 musical memory that go into improvising or composing. But also into the listener's experience of any given piece of music. There is the short-term memory of what happened earlier in a piece of music, but also the long-term, cultural memory that informs every performing/listening experience.
And whether short or long term, there is plenty of forgetting involved...
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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.
In the pilot episode for season three, I randomly stumble upon a couple of themes, including "My Funny Valentine" and "Money, Money, Money", then proceed to create a show out of them.
Along the way, I delve into what a "theme" is in musical terms. Is it like the theme of a story? Yes and no. In music, themes, as I discover in this episode, are far more fungible than their literary or dramatic counterpoints. They can magically transform into other themes; themes can generate new themes; musical elements that don't seem on the surface to be thematic can become so by their repeated use.
In short, just about any sonic event can become thematic. This is what makes music special.
As we'll find out in season three!
Music Mentioned
My Funny Valentine
Money, Money, Money, Money
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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.
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My intent was to dive into Part 2 of my “End of Melody Episode,“ but by planned chance, I rolled the dice and came up with something completely different. Unplanned, but fated to be this way? Possibly.
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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?
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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?
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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.
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After I finished recording this episode, I remembered that I had already done one early laster season on the same subject. Thus the "again". I didn't go back and listen to that because I gotta believe this one's completely different. Or is it?
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I was watching Jerry Seinfeld's new standup release on Netflix the other night and it put me in the mind of nothing. Specifically, how we build music out of essentially meaningless sound events that end up adding up to...something?
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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.
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It's been a LONG wait, but season two is just about ready to launch. With an exciting new format and several new features, it will be well worth the wait!
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What if I came up with a theme in the morning, then improvised variations throughout the day? What would that add up to? Call it a variation on the theme and variations idea, but in the form of a diary of a single day in the life of Peter Saltzman.
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Do you ever think about what you’re thinking about? Of course, you do, and I often think about what I’m thinking about when improvising. But when I pose this question to the great French pianist-composer Jean-Michel Pilc in this episode, his answer is sort of along the lines of...a kind of nothing. Sort of.
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For years I’ve had this thought that I should be able to improvise a full 4-movement piano sonata. Is this just another example of me being completely out of touch with my times? Well yes. But that doesn’t mean it won’t work.
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In the interests of busting yet another musical myth, I improvise a nocturne in the afternoon. At least it’s relatively dark in its sweetness.
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...Or how musical order insists on materializing out of seemingly random occurrences...
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Yes, that’s right, improvisations with sports-style play-by-play analysis—including instant replay!
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Is it possible to make beautiful music with just two intertwining melodies? Bach did. Can I?
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It's Friday, so in honor of Joe Friday from Dragnet I give you these three unrelated (both to each other and the TV show) improvisations. Back next week with a full episode...
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...Another short, wisp of an episode to fill in the gaps between the long, meandering yet highly focused main episodes...
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You can create nearly perfectly executed music in this world—as long as it’s not original.
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Back in the day, the great classical composers were brilliant improvisers. Are they still? Is it even possible?
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Yet another mini-bonus episode, which can only mean one thing: I'm working on a BIG episode. Until then...Enjoy!
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To be brief: I never much cared for minimalism until I minimally did.
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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.
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Another short episode for your listening pleasure while I work assiduously on two full episodes that are driving me crazy. (Hopefully, they won't drive you crazy.)
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This episode is the first (possibly the last) in a series of short daily, or every-other-daily, or even less frequent "podisodes" to go with your morning coffee or afternoon tea or evening drink or right before bed.
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Are free will and free improvisation really free, or am I deluding myself? And is deluding myself a necessary condition for free will/improvisations?
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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.
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The episode in which anything can happen but mostly doesn't...
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Left-leaning improvisations on patriotic tunes for (what’s left of) Independence Day.
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I'll never dive fully into the avant-garde, but dipping my feet in that pool can be quite exhilarating!
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Why am I a lousy film composer? Could it be because I'm a composer?
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You may hate the avant-garde but, dammit, you need it more than you think.
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A bluesy improvisation on the theme from the slow movement of Beethoven's Emperor Concerto inevitably leads me down the path of the inevitability of noninevitability.
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My recording equipment was flipping out (or maybe It was me). Which may seem like a hindrance to artistic expression, but then I realized that the flipping out was part of the flipping art!
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What is a blues? A genre? Musical form? A scale? It's all of those things and more because the blues is a fundamental musical structure with infinite possibilities for making musical statements. Which I find out here...
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When a free improvisation doesn't go the way I planned it leads me to the conclusion that sometimes the best-laid plans are the unlaid plans.
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Melodies aren't infinite, so don't sue me if my tune "sounds" somewhat like "yours."
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The last episode was a rant in defense of musical complexity; this one, of course, takes the opposite view. Sort of.
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Part 1 of a rant (that will undoubtedly have many parts) on why we are so afraid of musical complexity.
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A quick overview of what you'll hear on "Improvisations on the Ledge"...
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A simple hymn-like tune gone wrong...because that's what I do.
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In this episode I dissect one of my pop tunes from the 1980s and the way in which it appropriates multiple styles across the world and centuries—which is not only a good thing but completely natural. So get over it...
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A reboot of Improvisations on the Ledge as a solo act (for now.) Somehow I conflate my free improvisation here with Damian Lillard's game and series-winning shot the other night.
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