On the entity that we call the audience
Reflections from the world of the master pianist Lubomyr Melnyk
“What mattered to us all then, was that they, I, all of us as audience, were listening to human things; our presences there were being washed by human waves of what-we-can-do... you can't give people more than that”
This ‘essai’ is taken from my work-in-progress website, where I hope to share, and make easier to learn and understand, the music and philosophy of the unique pianist Lubomyr Melnyk, I a long-time and very passionate student of his. I am not sure how readable this is for people not already attempting to be immersed in his world (i.e. almost everyone) so would appreciate comments.
Lubomyr has thought much about the nature of audience, and most of these thoughts are locked away in his head, his words to students and his writings. He has experienced confused audiences, unhearing audiences, empty audiences, and absolutely astounded audiences, in his over 50 years of unique play. Here I grapple with those of his thoughts I’ve been privy to, and my own experience. All unattributed quotes are quotes from him, the majority of which come from his privately published major text “Open Time: the Art of Continuous Music”.
Feel free to peruse my playlist of his music (my YouTube channel being dedicated to him), and take a look at his unsatisfactory Wikipedia page, if you have absolutely no idea who he is. We would appreciate any support you can lend to his music. It is unique, but his students are few: his legacy, endangered.
Lubomyr's stance, as I understand it, is essentially a delicate balance between considering playing before, and giving to, an audience as very important, and considering performing for an audience as unimportant, a distraction, even a danger. Yet, he was grieved when I told him of a time when I played before an audience that mostly was not listening, saddened by his perception that I was "the only audience member". So, this might lead us to believe he thinks playing for audience and getting listeners and praise and so on is important.
"Neither you nor the music possess any stage. There is no platform for adoration. For the concept of 'stage' is the denial against the truth of our active time"
Ok, so maybe we should just not expect, or hope for, praise. But even that he is not especially happy with:
"Do not deny the presence of the audience. But do not play for the audience, nor to them... You are not entertaining"
Yet, he once wrote this to me:
"Dear Nathan, that is so nice to hear! It is great that you play in front of people, and very important for your development mainly in the body and the mind because when you play for a public, your body and your mind are set to "Maximum Output" - very good for the body and for the Mind!"
This essai is an attempt to bring these three, perhaps “at-odds”, comments together to a common (but vague) understanding.
Lubomyr has said that beauty is the goal, and that self development is another goal, of the pianist - but both of these ideas ought to be understood carefully. Continuous music is neither selfish and self-absorbed nor narcissistically in love with its own beauty and appearance:
"Do not tempt people with concepts of your beauty. The profession is infected with the sub-conscious tantalisation of the audience - and the audience cries for it, begs for it, feels cheated without it... Dressing in the permitted costumes of sexuality, he perches atop the stool, exuding the false skin, ... what has your organic self to do with this beauty?"
This quote is also about the physical appearance of the performer. Lubomyr has a few extended critiques of 'dressing up' for the audience. This is not to say that Lubomyr believes your concert hall pianist is like a shirtless boyband prancing around at a festival - he just elucidates his point through a minor exaggeration.
"We have seen this already, this loss of time - people go to concerts not so much to hear a piece of music, as to see a certain performer. After all, they already 'have' the music on record"
And it's not self-absorbed:
"The player who plays to know himself is already at poverty with the world... know that there are no great men, so that you do not aspire to be one of those who does not exist"
So what is it? What is the audience for? I'm tempted to wheel out the tired old line of 'if a tree falls in a forest with no-one around to hear it, does it make a sound?' Though tired, the question still has some merit. When the continuous pianist plays 'alone', they can find the space to listen very deeply to the sound of the piano, and allow hidden overtones and rhythms to emerge - to love the sound - and to hear their own sense of time ticking along, imparting emotion to the playing. When there is an audience, now the player has to adjust from allowing only their sense of time to tick along, but balance the sense of time of the other humans in the room. This makes almost no sense: the reader may expect a specific remark, something concrete to do, some certain adjustment in attitude to make.
But it can make a great deal of sense, if you sit with it. In practicing his Meditations (his most basic exercises), say, you may repeat the same passage for an hour. Few audiences would appreciate this. While this act is not necessarily self-absorbed, if done properly i.e. with a view to exploring the touch and sound of the piano, it is an act of self-development above all else; you are practicing. The audience member is not playing alongside you and feeling what you are feeling, so you are not giving them much more after the fifth minute. In playing Pockets of Light, you might maintain the fluxes for a very long time, enjoying your control over the patterns and the emergent sound, but again after a while the benefit is going solely to you, the student and player - because you’re definitely going to support me in preserving his music, right? :)
It is important to remember that continuous music is much, much more wonderful for the performer than the audience member. This is not a defect. What is also important, but significantly harder to describe, is that "time" here is not just the meted, allocated number of seconds you held a section of the piece for. The audience member's function is not limited to forcing you to play faster, or less languorously.
To perhaps add more confusion, here are some quotes about time and audience both, both drawn from "The Human Reality of Continuous Music":
“The first question: is it possible, or even necessary, to generate the real act of continuous playing before an audience? Because in the real act, the idiot player falls asleep to time, and what audience is interested in that? For the activation of a continuous playing, the most necessary elements have been fixed to constitute a 'piece': already the full material has been notated from which the player must shape the singing of the music. The only fundamental element left unspecified is time."
“In this freedom, the listener and player are united together by one acknowledgement: that what will event from the ‘concert’ will surprise both of them in time - by their own presence within it”
Lubomyr has referred to sleep more than once. A common mistake, that I made for a long time, is to think this music is just about falling into a trance. And when you read:
"The most difficult is to fall asleep in front of your audience" - [after a long passage about many things, all of which were called 'the most difficult']
It's hard not to develop this misconception. But I suppose when we sleep, we dream.
So the audience member encourages you to focus not just on the joys found in practice, but on the sound and the communal wonder. Lubomyr might add some more spiritual comments here. We love to see performers live in part because it is amazing to see your fellow human do something, something organic and current, here and now, there and then. I could listen to a recording of jazz improvisation and be somewhat impressed, but I am much more moved when I see my good friends play in this way; I get to be confronted with people whom I know, having a human skill completely beyond my comprehension, and I can share in that wonder - and they, surely, will find a joy in it that I cannot. Continuous music isn't any different, in that sense.
"If you pretend to delicacy, the walls of inertia will collapse upon you... you cannot make contact with your voice if you dangling a lure in front of the audience. Do not expect to speak the truth through a mask"
Continuous music is very, very personal. Most music is, but I'm not sure that most music demands the same personal contact with the instrument as a basic prerequisite for playing well. Lubomyr likens it to singing, and said once that this music is like the 'operatic voice' for the piano. So you do have to present yourself to the audience, but it has to be in a very honest way. This is partially what he means by "your voice"; again, this is an abstract comment. I am not recommending any specific action as necessary. I make and repeat these comments only because, when I read Lubomyr, when I read his main treatise, Open Time, I was moved to understand something I hadn't 'known about' before, and all my subsequent performances were better because of it.
“Whether the piece is 2 hours long or 17 minutes long, the player is to play from his own being, and more to himself than to any Other. This does not mean that the player is to ignore the presence of an audience, be it one or more people - not at all - (for what the player creates and recreates is given to himself and to the audience) rather, the player is sounding himself, as though he were himself the strings that are vibrating… for nowhere on the path is the player to stand still… the sound of his creation is constantly shifting, the overtones consistently climbing over one another, changing place, in time”
But, we must be careful to strike a balance between sharing and showing the personality. Contrast:
“If you speak to others from the drama of your time, then you give to them your greatest gift. It matters not whether it is rejected or accepted... What matters is that it has been given.”
With:
“There is a fashion in clothing as well as in music… to play, one must be faceless. you shall be glad for the clothing that comes your way”
I will finish this section with a quote having a slightly different focus. It adds a little context to the next section, too.
"Remember that your playing is a gift, so do not hurry the giving of it. Wild flowers are growing everywhere. They too are gifts... But how many stop to look at them? If they hurried to come to flower, would that change anything? Or make them dearer? Do not wait for audiences to roar in approval; if someone has stopped to pick the flower of this moment, that is a gift for you. Many moments will fall to the ground, as unpicked fruit.
Let them return to the soil. Play on. Do not bother too much to change the shape and colours of your flower to try to dazzle those who are walking by. The sun too tis dazzling, more than any weed flower, but [do] many people bother with it? Keep playing. No, forget to play. Keep thinking. No, forget to think. Keep living. No, forget that too. Just go. On."
It is important to not be too deterred if a certain performance misses the mark, if you 'failed' somehow (you didn't) or if the people there weren't ready to like the music. Not everyone will. This is not because your playing is inherently amazing and is, by default, valuable, no matter what people think. That is not what the above quote means. I leave it to you to figure out a different meaning.
My experience
Speaking to the hypothetical continuous student, I would say: when you do start to get good at this continuous music, and be amazed by not only what is possible in some abstract way but by what is possible from you, you will still not find a stage, or adoration. Not even Lubomyr truly finds this. At any of his events, some are amused, some are bemused, and then there are the others like me on the verge of tears. At your events, you may find a handful of people, some ones who could listen intellectually, and a fewer number of ones who could listen with their whole heart; maybe this "fewer number" is just yourself. And that is fine.
I never really had an audience, for a long time; frankly, I was unworthy of one. Perhaps I still am. I never hear my own recordings and imagine wanting to listen to them. I only know how they sounded for me, at the time of playing, and how it felt, and there came a point where performances consistently started to feel, for me, as wonderful, relative to my own expectations. If you have never had an audience, it can feel bold, arrogant maybe, to play your strange, mysterious 'continuous music' before a crowd who don’t know, and can't be expected to enjoy, this strangeness. This is closer to ‘imposter syndrome’ than genuine stage fright.
What I have observed, and what has been confirmed by people who've seen me play live, is that the performance of the piece, both in the sense of its sound, goodness and its capacity to engage (rather than entertain), is much better when I and the listener both understand that I am sounding something - giving brief life to an existing song - which goes forth with my full attention and some piece of me, and that the something, and the attention I've given it, may both be shared by the listener.
That was wordy. I'm struggling to get at exactly what I mean, but it is true when I play (or, rather, when I play best) my mind is not on sounding good but rather it is on the good sound (hopefully!), and with eyes firmly closed I just perceive the audience at the edge of consciousness and adjust my time and tone so that I don't dwell too long on a repeated phrase and so that I smoothly (hopefully) pass over any note inaccuracies; it is best when I perceive specific aspects of a piece which I think are more beautiful and give those aspects more weight, when giving the piece to human listeners.
I accept that this may be "wrong" i.e. not quite the optimal relationship, or the relationship Lubomyr has developed. I have found the relationship to be more of the following form:
The audience is trying to understand what I have put into the piece, and trying to share a bit of humanity with me (and sometimes appreciate that more than the sound itself!)
Rather than of the form:
I am trying to give the audience the best possible sound, and best possible experience they could have that night, and the audience is expecting me to do this
For example, I might have had stage fright, or an anxiety I would not be able to achieve a certain more difficult part of a piece, or trembling/tiring hands that might not be able to cope with the rest of the piece or its speed. But it is not important to give your audience anxiety, and instead more important to give them a taste of the potential sound; it sounds a little crazy, but having that thought actively in my mind has saved me from collapsing at the stage more than once.
Lubomyr once told me, when I was struggling in a lesson we had, something along the lines of: "if your hands can hear the beautiful sound, they won't want to make a mistake". What I just said is not the same, but the sentiment is similar. My playing is worst when I have actively thought about looking and sounding good for the audience; I have only really done this once, and I lost my place and stumbled in a piece I ordinarily know very well.
Finally, I would like to share a story Lubomyr tells, which echoes that last paragraph, in Open Time.
"A campfire story now: about my first 'public' concert in Paris; it was 'public' because no public came"
He speaks of playing some music for two pianos (i.e. playing over a taped recording of himself); after a long time, a delay of a half hour, nothing was working, and none had come to help him setup. When things were eventually working, the amplifier was at top volume, bellowing, roaring; he maintained his song for approximately 15 minutes, finding that the (live) piano could not be heard at all.
"All the while asking: what was more important to give these people? Finally, I went over to the wall plug, and pulled out the cord; at each step to the wall, I saw better and better what the word 'technique' meant, and why it was important to everyone... I began to play again... our pleasure at the space we were alive in, the space our beings occupied in body and soul and on Earth, our space within the room returned to us, and our beinghood spread out from us... what I had then to give was quite different from what I had given 10 minutes before; the human beingness that was capable of playing at the instrument began to play again...
Free of its prison of self dimension that... silenced the happy drone of our livingness, blinded our feelers, cut off our arms and legs... free, we were able to share our existence in the room; and the technique of a living player was speaking from the human dimension, from the body of its soul...
What mattered to us all then, was that they, I, all of us as audience, were listening to human things; our presences there were being washed by human waves of what-we-can-do.... this living presence was playing at the piano; the spaceless knowledge of the self was playing at the piano; you can't give people more than that"
When, two months ago, I dared to perform "Parasol" with my own ‘arpegge’ (not arpeggio!) variations at the end, a technique I had only begun to learn just a few weeks before, at my college, I was most nervous. I was speaking with one of my closest friends right up until the concert started, getting some reassurance; in practice earlier in the day, my arms had shaken and my hands had fumbled. But as I came to the stage and started playing, I felt calm. When I approached the arpegge variations, and decided to go through with them, I remembered Lubomyr's story and consciously thought about what was important to give, and I gave it. Aye, I fumbled a few notes, but kept rolling; it mattered not. The personal confusion was not mine to selfishly impose on the audience; there was a song to be had.
This piece of writing is itself a flower to be picked! Thanks for sharing the experiences and ideas, and taking the time to open the conversation out in this way - feeling now like I might well try my hand(s) at continuous music in the medium-distance future. I've found your playing really wonderful to hear and watch; really cool to hear a bit of the theory behind/within it 💜🎶 thanks Nathan.
In the meantime, wondering if anybody thinks there is a book genre or kind of writing comparable to Lubomyr's style? Or similar in its approach to audience. Maybe a basis for future Substack contributions, who knows ;-)
There was a song to be had…thank you.