Getting started

I almost don't want to write this page. The themes are too broad, and really it is quite essential that you get to meet Lubomyr, send him some recordings, let him see and hear your playing, to have a sense of where you really are at (which he welcomes, from anyone). You are welcome to reach out to me, as well.

I leave some general points at the bottom of this page, but encourage you to remember there are no real master-tips, no absolutes.

You could be a very advanced classical or jazz pianist and it could still be worth your while to play the most basic exercises of continuous music, if you want to take this seriously. This is not an insult, just an acknowledgement of a difference in what the music requires. It might not be necessary - but this is hard for the beginner to judge accurately; very hard. The metric of playing well is not purely a function of note accuracy, rhythmic and dynamic control and musicality. The little something else is not so little.

Getting started is about understanding static-position play, and understanding the essential ideas so that you can begin to hear and feel for yourself what is wrong; even now, most of my work has gone into trying to master a basic way of being that you first encounter in the Meditations. In some sense, the years have gone by in order for me to understand better (in my muscles and my headspace both) this one thing. And this thing is nebulous, and your muscles change slowly, so one must be very, very patient; and, in words, the message of what you have to do will not change much - but your understanding of it (outside of words) will. Your focus can shift, eventually: the most notable deviation from working on this 'basic state of being' has been working on "arpegge play", which Lubomyr only recently began to teach me.

Humility is essential. I could play Pockets of Light quite well, I thought, after a month or two. Before I really had any lessons with Lubomyr. Depending on how generous I am feeling, I will say that it actually took me a further two or three years before I could begin to really play that piece, and there is still room for improvement. Even when you realise all the note-forms are rather simple-seeming.

The Meditations are very important to do. You understand why only after you have done them well, but I will try to put it into words. Before I do that, let me remind you that you can buy them off of Lubomyr, either by direct contact or from his main website; I have put out some tutorials for selected meditations (so far, only two, but I hope to make tutorials for all of them) and you can find recordings of them on my channel as well. There is not necessarily any one way to play them; I enjoy them, for the most part, as slow-moderate and soft pieces, and for a beginner I encourage this as well, but Lubomyr tends to play them more stridently and energetically. Meditations 1A and 1C are the most peaceful and softly-singing (do them first); Meditations 1B, 1D and 2A have more of a driving energy (or can have, if you will it) and are more strenuous on the hand.

Why are they good? They are very simple, note-theoretically speaking. If you have had some non-negligible piano training, you will find them mostly fairly easy, from this standpoint: you will be able to confidently play any individual bar. So this is good material for the new student, because it levels the playing field; you will find difficult (probably, and perhaps unknowingly!) only the more important aspects (the notes, really, are not important). These pieces instead invite you to explore the most primitive, original form of continuous music, which comes from the sensation of self-replicating and incongruous patterns in the two hands; two hands which, almost surely, will feel as distinct entities for you (in the long run, the goal is to lose this distinction). I emphasise self-replicating because the impetus will have to come from the music itself, in some sense; you will have to find out what it feels like for the hands to generate the figures without powering through each note with each tense finger. Although continuous music is not about mindlessness, you do have to start somewhere and the meditations are good at encouraging this; when you start to play them well you will know this automatic sensation, and have an idea of what it is like to position yourself somewhere above the keys and the moving hands, letting them handle themselves, and focus on more interesting things like the overall sound, the overlapping tones and emergent extra-rhythms, and the feeling of proper synchronicity.

These are all feelings you will come back to again and again, and deepen your appreciation for, and the Meditations give you a foot in that door.

What comes next? I asked myself that, a lot. In the first few years I was frequently disappointed in my progress, bemoaning the fact I had run out of basic exercises and the few more advanced things that I had, I struggled to do. Lubomyr does have a fair few pieces after the meditations, but I also... found them slightly boring, in my impatience. I understood there was more work to do, in the pieces that I could get a grip on, but struggled to make perceptible progress. In some sense, nothing comes next. If you have managed to really understand the purpose and the goal, you can explore and find it for yourself at the keyboard, as Lubomyr did. I imagine no one will recreate that feat, but it is certainly true that a lot of this learning comes from simply sitting with yourself, playing ad infinitum, maybe introducing your own modulations and experiments in the given piece (I am personally very bad at composition or improvisation, but maybe you aren't!), chasing that feeling.

But what feeling, exactly, should we chase? I try to give a sense of that in this website, in the various other articles. I was given new energy to press on when I read "Open Time", and started to take his softer, philosophical notions far more seriously and find them in my own playing. This experience has formed a part of my motivation to make this website - almost no one has, or can, read this book, so I should try to simulate the experience in a more public domain.

What can come next (and this is what I did not really do - a mistake) is revisiting the Meditations. When I have revisited them now, to record tutorials or performances for my channel, I have realised plenty of things which are lacking; on a piano with stiff keys, even Meditation 1D can cause strain on the hand if you are not careful, and don't take the piece seriously; be sure to be observant and know the difference between fast-running and easeful fast-running. But also: when you have an idea of how the hands should properly move, you imagine it and think you are done (because you play with your eyes closed), but the camera reveals that the movement you make in your mind's eye is far more pronounced than the movements you actually make. In slow-motion, you can understand how to be, but in free-running you likely will lose much - and this would be true for a simple piece like a Meditation, or for a concert piece like Parasol. There are many other little pieces Lubomyr has written, the Rondo and Rondex pieces, the 12-note pieces, the Flow pieces, which are good to try.

The Circular Etudes can also come next, but these are quite advanced pieces. His old websites and some old comments suggest otherwise - that they are beginner's pieces - but this is not so. You can take it from him as well as me; I think Lubomyr vastly underestimated, at first, the challenge other people would find in his music (among the few who actually have bothered to give it a go). Maybe two years ago, he actually said a part of him regrets writing the Erased Tapes scorebook, because people (like myself!) were simply not ready for pieces like Pockets of Light - and he worried about the damage trying to force these pieces might cause to their hands. He has always been a little reluctant to give me pieces, until fairly recently, for this reason. This ... annoyed me, but there was wisdom in it. To progress you will need a taste of what's ahead - you need the psychological boost that comes from doing a hard thing: so, by all means, give Pockets of Light, Butterfly, Parasol, the Moving Window a go (all the four continuous pieces from the Erased Tapes scorebook); give Cloud No. 81 and Barcarolle a go (available on his website); these are all serious pieces, but really very challenging. DO NOT force speed, in any of them; do not make strenuous thumb-cramping leaps in Cloud 81 or in Parasol, in particular; do not break your hands trying to get the calm rolling arpeggios of Barcarolle. If you approach them well, you will understand clearly the challenges these pieces pose, and good patience and constant re-examining of your contact with the piano is needed to overcome them. I still struggle with Barcarolle and Butterfly; I can "play" them, and my butterfly has made people cry, but some of the fluidity and musicality is still missing. It is all a jumble of notes, for me, still; I am missing some kind of bird's eye view.

So, don't read Open Time, yet; I needed more time and maturity to appreciate that book, and will come back to it. Don't move on to the Circular Etudes yet, either (if, by some miracle, you have access to copies of either of those books), and go carefully in attacking the few of his pieces which have been properly published.

Do the Meditations. Do them justice, and ideally talk to Lubomyr (or myself) about them. In the meantime, try to read some of what I have written. Try to get a sense of the perspective on speed, synchrony and all the rest of it. The hand-waviness frustrated me greatly, and it might frustrate you, but it is the only way. Listen to his music, too; if you absolutely cannot hear the glory in his more impressive pieces (Amazon, the Six Day Moment, Mirior D'Amour, Beyond Romance, Windmills, just to name a few) then this music is probably not for you - not yet, anyway. And when listening, give it proper attention; try to hear what makes it so different. This comes with the unfortunate downside of hearing what your own playing lacks, but that's ok. I have struggled with that feeling, and speak about it here.

Some general remarks, to bear in mind when attempting to grapple with this music for the first time.

Use the pedal, always (in these early pieces, certainly). It is your friend. In continuous music, you generally value the full resonance of each note - you wish for the piano to sing out, fully. You do not wish to curtail the sound, cut the life of a note short, when the music is about living. There are exceptions, of course. You likely will have learned not to 'mash' the pedal, and hold it fully, in your previous piano education - if you had a traditional one - and now it is time to revisit that idea. The pieces are such that holding the pedal is not a problem.

The music should be practiced and performed, to the greatest extent possible, with your eyes closed. Visual stimuli are needlessly distracting, and can snag the trailing, untrained mind on some irrelevant branch, and disrupt your play. It is well known in various contexts that the eyes should be closed to allow the right kind of thinking and feeling to occur, in meditation in particular, and this music is no different. In attempting to understand your physical dimensions, to navigate the keyboard blind, you develop a sense of space and control which is essential for the music (and just feels nice!). So, this is new to a lot of people; it is ok to practice with eyes open at first, maybe even play with the eyes open, but try to train yourself to start to handle things with eyes wide shut. It is well worth the effort.

This music is, more or less, without bar lines. Or specific metrics such as 3/4. A given piece can usually be divided into fluxes, as the fundamental unit. These are sequences of patterns, usually two, sometimes three or four, where the right and left hands each have their own figure to play, and maintain, and then at will you move to the next pattern, the counterpart(s), and then at will return to the starting figure. This is a serious difference with traditionally scored music, and psychologically difficult at first. You have, on the page, two bars. The first showing one pattern, the second its counterpart. But you do not just play two bars. You maintain the first, and try to calmly slip into the second - perhaps with the left and right hands changing at different times. You ought to glance at your sheet music for guidance, but not stare at it and follow it note-for-note. If it feels unsettling having the full control over the durations and the changes, let me just say this feeling does not last; you will learn to love this as you should.

If you make a change from one pattern to the next, and mess it up, you are actually free to keep going, let the notes run and try to readjust your hand until you are playing correctly again. This could be difficult. But know that you don't have to stop, and it would be considered correct playing; some 'mistakes' are fine, just natural variations in the journey of your particular performance of this piece at this hour on this day.

As a brief justification for this: if this music is to somehow "be about" living, energy, continuity, physical experience, you do not want to be limited, bound in a box, tasked with playing for exact lengths of time. This is especially pleasant when practicing, as you really are free to hold something until it feels comfortable, or to hold a flux for a very long time until the changes feel easy and the overall thing feels delightful. In more complicated cases, you can play the same exercise for an hour, or for 15 minutes. This does not mean you lose musicality. You don't really get to lazily dawdle on one figure for an age, in public performance. But I leave discussion of that for later.

"Do not worry of fear when the pattern of the changing notes (in either or both hands) becomes inverted or in the 'wrong' order, either at point of change in patterns, or in flux changes; for mindlessness will restore the 'correct' order by peace and gentleness. The knowledge of the figure as a block will re-establish the figure into its true position, while the mind maintains the flow without panic or destruction."

This music requires trance-like thought, ability to while away the time unnoticing, be adrift on the stream of the sound.. but it is not really mindlessness. Your first meditations start to, if you approach them well, give you a sense of this feeling. You do have to tap into it; you cannot reject it, on grounds of 'spiritual nonsense' or whatever - if you cannot get over that, you will not be able to do this music. It could take a long time to develop a nontrivial appreciation for this, though. The following quote intrigued me when I first read it:

"Do not think that in playing this music, you can sit back, and relax like a driver of a car behind his steering wheel while some mysterious force, a mental power, will play the music for you."

While this is worth bearing in mind, I think for the beginner - at least in my experience of learning - you might be more like the driver in a driving lesson, taken out to some wide, open country roads, flat, with no-one about, where you can start to know driving and get the sense of agency and control ... but in a very peaceful and often uneventful way. You are almost the passenger of your driving instructor, in those early lessons.

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