> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://musically-novel.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Nobody’s Listening Anyway - URL: https://musically-novel.ghost.io/nobodys-listening-anyway/ - Published: 2026-08-21T19:59:41.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-02T17:05:59.000Z - Description: Two Bad Musical Thoughts - Author: PETER SALTZMAN - Tags: Ocassionally Random, improvisation, Thelonious Monk, Stravinksy, Newsletter, #Migrated-1788368492164, #Import 2026-09-02 17:05 There is a certain degree of solipsistic self-indulgence in sharing two improvisations on a Friday. As in, because I improvised them, they must be good. But with a bit of distance—I improvised these on Tuesday morning—I believe I can muster enough critical discernment to recognize whether something is good or not. Distance is key because when you first create something, it is easy to be amazed by the fact that you just created something—a kind of tautological sense of wonder at your own fecundity. That’s why I almost never share something on the same day I created it. I go back and listen a day or two later and decide: this is pretty good; this is not. I have a particular set of criteria for judging whether something is good in music. But with the initial creative act, whether it’s composing or improvising, my first instinct is to trust my instincts. To be sure, these are finely honed instincts. What are instincts, after all, in the professional sense? A professional baseball player, say Pete Crow-Armstrong of the Chicago Cubs, has about .15 seconds to decide whether to swing at a 100 MPH fastball—and, if he does, where and how to swing. With that little amount of time, he can’t exactly have a meeting to discuss the virtues of swinging or not. He must rely on instinct. But those instincts aren’t purely inborn: they are a combination of brilliant talent and thousands of hours of practice refining his craft. In the moment, he goes with his gut, but it is a gut driven by an incredible degree of talent and skill. That is professional instinct. Improvisation works this way. The first improvisation here was the very first thing I played on Tuesday morning at precisely 8:28 am, before I had practiced, before I composed, before I thought about music at all. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t think about anything. In fact, I had a very specific thought. I wanted to do something wrong: specifically, excess parallelism. You can hear it in the opening, where I purposely violate the voice-leading conventions of common-practice harmony: seventh chords in root position sliding mostly downward in parallel through the middle register of the piano. In the Baroque and Classical periods, this kind of thing was basically a no-no. In others, it was used artfully. In later musical languages, though, it was used artfully. Go listen to the pandiatonic opening of Stravinsky’s *Three Movements from Petrushka*: a lot of chords moving in parallel. But even in a musical language where it isn’t considered taboo, too much of it is bad form. Not just bad form: it sounds bad. Stravinsky, you will note, breaks the pattern pretty quickly. So, being both a musical contrarian and a traditionalist, I decided to do too much of a bad thing and see what I could make of it. In other words, in this improvisation, I deliberately did more than I knew was in good taste. But being an artist of eminent taste beneath all the bluster, I had to figure out a way to make it sound good. My solution was to add a melody over the top to somewhat mitigate the evil parallelism—and then do some other crazy shit to make it bearable, because I was getting annoyed with myself. The end result, which I am convinced (three days later) is very cool, is a combination of instinct and calculation. The calculation was that initial, somewhat defiant thought: I’m going to do something bad. The instinct was to clean up the mess, make it somehow musical. The second improvisation, Bad Thought #2, was also precipitated by another foul idea: Let us play an ugly chord. The formulation comes, of course, from Genesis: “Let us make man in our image.” I’m not comparing myself to the singular multifaceted creator, but the “us” is, in some sense, true. The making of that bad chord (an E major triad in first inversion with the flat nine, F, directly above the E, thus creating a harsh dissonance right out of the gate) had a lot of history built into it even as it was struck: I probably immediately thought of Thelonious Monk, then Arnold Schoenberg in his atonal period before he went and became the serial killer of musical instinct. I then go and pretty it up with some nice tonal stuff, before coming back to the ugly chord. And then it stops before it really has a chance to take off. Which is my way of saying, enough! --- This post is an improvisation itself, starting somewhat randomly but ending with me remembering that I neglected to explain something I posed at the beginning: what exactly are my criteria, other than instinct, for determining whether something is musically good or not? It’s simple: it has to deliver on the promise stated at the instinctual beginning. You set something up; you must carry it through and know when to stop. I gave up on the second track too soon, but it was enough. --- Next week, Part two of my musical memoir, *Blues, Preludes and Feuds,* is launched here on Substack. You can dive into the Prelude and Part 1 [here](https://musically-novel.ghost.io/blues-preludes-and-feuds-the-index/). [Subscribe](#/portal/signup)