Lubomyr Melnyk's My World interview: “I could feel the continuous energy pouring through my body and arms and hands”

Interviewing the Ukrainian pianist Lubomyr Melnyk is much like hearing him perform – there is nobody out there quite like him. This is something I ask him about in our conversation – why is nobody else playing piano in this way? Where are your disciples? First though, let’s explain what makes him so special.

Melnyk is the creator of Continuous Music, which he describes as “a new language for the piano”. It’s a style of piano playing driven by technique (and a particular mindset). It’s said that Melnyk can play up to 19.5 notes per second, which, if true, makes him the fastest piano player in the world. What this means in artistic terms is completely different.

I first saw Melnyk perform in 2016 at a small amphitheatre in Barcelona. Softly spoken, with a wild grey beard and unspectacular shirt and trousers, he looked every bit the eccentric science teacher. Then he sat at the piano and out poured continuous cascades of notes, the piano being used to create textures and rhythms as much as melody. It was all encompassing and, dare I say it, transcendent. Each time Melnyk changed a note in the series he was playing, it was like a prod to my senses; my whole body would react; in just a few minutes, he’d obliterated any outside noise standing between me and the music. “Continuous piano is a purely zen activity,” he tells me during our conversation. “It unites sound with the soul… wherein the energy ultimately alters the very fabric of your body.”

Lubomyr Melnyk was born in 1948 in Munich, West Germany, to Ukrainian refugee parents. By the early 1950s, his family, fleeing the Communist expansion, had relocated to Canada. Music was a big part of his early life. “Our home was always joyfully filled with beautiful songs and mother’s beautiful voice – she was trained [as an opera singer] in pre-Bolshevik Ukraine, before the Russians destroyed everything. For the most part, I listened to Ukrainian folk and salon music [a 19th-century genre], and also the music of the church had a deep influence.”

His family owned a piano which Melnyk began playing at age three. The instrument would dominate his life, with his early years completely focused on playing classical music, with Beethoven, Brahms and Chopin all formative influences. After graduating from university in Winnipeg, he moved to Paris in the 1970s. I ask him what brought about the move. “It was the realisation that North America has no foundation in art and music. My heart and soul were always at home in Europe where all the truly great things had happened – the European mind is much more suited for exploring beauty.”

It was in Paris that he had his epiphany. He was broke, barely able to afford food, but he had a job at the Paris Opera playing piano for the dance classes of choreographer Carolyn Carson. While Carson tried to teach the dancers to transcend time and space through their minds, not their bodies, Melnyk tried to do the same with the piano. “Carolyn was our inspiration. She was, and remains, beyond human, always striving to give each of us the capacity to transcend the ‘normal’ and enter the super state of artistic consciousness.”

His love of classical music was vital in defining his style. “I was thinking specifically of the string trios of Joseph Haydn, where the harmonic resonance flows like velvet as it strolls through the garden.” He was also affected by Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain, which he saw in a Paris cinema in 1973: “It had a profound effect on me because of his wondrous portrayal of this ‘magic holy glue’ as mystical geometric shapes that could float…”

These influences coalesced in Melnyk’s conception of Continuous Music, which required a new technique for playing the piano, involving the learning of new patterns on both hands to create “rivers” of sound. He’s said it took him years to physically and mentally achieve what he was striving for. “It was an intense period of physical and spiritual development”, he recalls of those days in Paris. “If you can imagine the first man to discover Tai Chi. This is precisely how it was. A transformation of the body and mind into unimagined capacities that no one had before. I could feel the continuous energy pouring through my body and arms and hands.”

Melnyk released his debut album, KMH: Piano Music in the Continuous Mode, in 1978. It was hailed as a minimalist masterpiece, on par with the works of Steve Reich and Terry Riley. Melnyk, though, had been reluctant to release anything at all. “For years, I refused to make recordings of Continuous Music, because the sound of the piano was, and is, sacred. It cannot be recorded. The sound of the Continuous Piano is too complex and there are no microphones in existence that can receive the enormous profundity of sound it produces. So, I had to choose between only 12 people in the world ever hearing this music for real, or doing recordings where at least thousands could get a glimpse of this new world of the piano.”

To date, Melnyk has released over 40 albums, the majority of which are self-released. There are albums of solo piano and two pianos (Melnyk playing two interlocking piano parts) as well as works with string trios and quartets, and with ensembles. He will premiere his next work, Mantras, with the London Ambient Orchestra. “I love the Mantras”, he says. “They are so deeply peaceful and yet dramatic all at once. They are also very difficult to work on since there are constant modifications, making the piece grow and grow in length. Creating the piano score is a major work – 300 pages for each ‘Mantra’!”

Melnyk has always been forthcoming about wanting to teach others the joys of playing Continuous Music, so I ask him why so few seem to be following in his footsteps. “The technique is the priesthood of the piano, and so it is probably seen by people as a ‘giving up’ of normality, forsaking ‘pleasures’, as though you might have to abstain from cake, instead of the fact that this music, and its technique, enhance your life 100,000 times. If I could share with anyone the incredible joy of the living piano, where the fingers and mind and the piano soar together up to heaven. If people could feel the physical beauty of playing this music, they would come in droves, but alas, I cannot give this experience to anyone who does not work to attain it.”

Finally, I ask how being Ukrainian has shaped the music he makes. “No one but a Ukrainian would have the defiance to seek out beauty through the suffering of absolute poverty that this entailed. The world has never been allowed to know the truth about my people and our art, thanks to the Russian occupation. Ukrainian song is drawn out of the deep Ukrainian soul.”

+ Lubomyr Melnyk will perform in Dublin (Feb 19), followed by the premiere of Mantras in London (Feb 21) and the US in March