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 want 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 the Meditations, 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.

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, 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 refers 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". And 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.

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 is not for the first time that I use this quote, it is a favourite. 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.

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 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.