"Better to say it is raining, and the player maintains"
"Better to say it is raining, and the player maintains"
This page is, I suppose, about keeping going. And about the why.
Continuous music can appear to be very difficult, and unless you are very remarkable, for a long time you will find yourself not, in a traditional sense, playing much of note. And so much of its 'difficulty' is invisible to the average onlooker, or even to the classically trained pianist-onlooker. It will likely be invisible to you, too, at first. It can even be invisible once you have come to know the technique a little better, because no difficulty in this music is of an essential type: once you overcome it, you understand it was always something that could be done, not easy, not hard; without strain, just with (perhaps) much activity.
"Continuous music is not difficult to learn. All the steps are quite small, and you take many steps and get better and better... [find] a balanced transcendence within the mind."
"If you attempt that which lies ahead of your reach, which can not even with effort in ease and peace and will, be extend to, and grasp, then you will be in danger of poisoning yourself by the concepts of 'I can not' - the negative destruction of your self. If a figure remains out of reach, lay it aside for another day. It is better to postpone the achievement, than to admit to an early defeat."
But, with that said:
You will not be able to wow any crowds; if you are anything like me, for a long time you will struggle to truly wow yourself. You will sit at that keyboard, give an hour or so of your time to stumble through a piece, perhaps hitting all of the right notes, and you won't hear any magic; you won't hear the beautiful and strong rolling tones of Lubomyr, this sound that you aim for; you won't hear the wonderful harmonies and flashy tricks and trills of a classical piece; you also won't move between the strong sounds of a classical piece, which immediately delight but immediately die away.
You will sit before a meditation, and play simple patterns ad infinitum, wondering at how easy this must be, wondering when you will get to the good part. Your mother or your friend might say: "that's nice, dear" and go about their day. You might then go for something different, and know all the notes to Butterfly, exactly and perfectly, yet play something almost-soulless and without any sparkle (more accurately, play something very soulful but without realising/reaching the soul of it).
You will be proud to play a piece, once, and then return to it and again find it flat, find your hand too tense; you will play a piece very fast and very wonderfully, and return to it as a snail, cramping up halfway through the performance.
Where is the beauty you were promised?
"Do not think that at all times you will flow on the gentle rolling surface. At times, the same figure will appear from you as a static driving energy coalition; it will rain in pieces falling together at a steady and heavy oneness of volume."
As a first response to the above list of problems, it is important to be find your peace with the fact that the organic piece (continuous music is essentially organic) will change everytime you return to it, sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes not. Your own state of mind is inexorably linked with the fate of the piece. When I have come to the keyboard, failed, and been upset, I have had to remember: I could do this before, and so I will do so again. The time, today, was just not right, for whatever reason - most likely a reason of my own mood, or tension in the hand. Nevertheless, it is so depressing to struggle with something you proudly blitzed through a month before: Pockets of Light and Parasol would very frequently give me thumb cramps, due to improper technique, and occasionally I would breeze through them and be so excited ... and then return, and not be as a breeze. But a piece of this music, once played, will stay played; your hand has understood the form, and you know there is no physical obstruction anymore. All that remains are the very real mental ones: of perceiving the chords, of relaxing, of using your attention in the right way, of hearing properly, of rejoicing... but, whether you were conscious of it or not, you found how to do all of that, for this piece, before: you can find it again.
And if you did not find all of that, or a part of that, then you had not truly 'breezed through the piece', so there is no particular loss - there is nothing to lament. This is a very important point: one must not be deluded by false progress. If you played very fast but were forcing yourself (even without realising) or out of control, out of sync (just to name some basic reasons) then you have done something, but it needs much improvement and is not a goal, not a high point you should try to return to. Often in the early days Lubomyr would correct my hand posture, my thoughts, my motion, and I would find the piece much harder; I would play more slowly, and struggle, suddenly aware of my faults; playing with better technique is, at first, more difficult, because you have to override your old bad habits which lent a false-ease to the piece. Good! The false 'high-points' I might have previously attained were things to be proud of but not things to cling to. To be clear, it is psychologically very important to have moments where you go fast and feel very good about what you are doing - every student yearns for that. I mean no insult to that. We just have to understand these moments for what they are.
A related point: you might record yourself. It is good to record yourself; in making videos for my YouTube channel I have often discovered things. You might listen to Lubomyr's recordings, too. But it is important to acknowledge that, somehow, for a reason I don't fully understand, the human and live presence completely changes the picture. Your recording will always be unfaithful; Lubomyr once said words to the effect of "if I did not have to eat, there would be no recordings", and his overall distrust of machines and appreciation for humanity is related to this. One of his Circular Etudes has the funny instruction that it should not be recorded (number 14). You might find yourself playing, and find yourself very immersed in your experience, enjoying it thoroughly, and then hear some kind of soullessness when you listen back to the recording. This partly will be due to gaps in the technique, of course; a lack of true immersion and true control; but in large part your eyewitness report of the music, at the centre of it, is far more accurate than the recording. This could sound a bit grandiose, or as a 'cope': "I sound bad because the recording didn't work, just trust me". That's not what I am saying, but it is difficult to pinpoint the real issue. Take your recordings instead as tools to indicate where you had irregularities in your speed, a lack of control, wild dynamics, whatever. As technical issues. But they will necessarily lose a lot of the musicality which is very particular to continuous music, and you ought to be prepared for that.
"I'm faced with the fact that this voice will disappear... and the recordings do not really contain the voice of the piano. Very faint photographs, a very feeble attempt to recreate the voice... this is the sorrow for me."
Continuous music is not for the audience, not really. It is of you, but somehow Lubomyr will say it is not even entirely for you either. This perspective of Lubomyr's is, I think, mostly due to his extremely advanced state: when he plays, he is showing us the best, almost as the servant of the piano - the personal joys he found long ago, and though he continues to find them wonderful they are already found. Now, for us, we are still seeking (so is he, but again, he is far beyond us for the moment), and I think it is reasonable to think of the music as at least partly for you. In these developing years, you are to discover what your body and mind can do, and even to discover how you enjoy life and shape how you think, beyond the keyboard. It is important to keep in mind that the music is for the instrument, as well. You have to be able to love the sound, but you will likely struggle with this from time to time.
"Do not deny the presence of the audience. But do not play for the audience, nor to them. Play, because you can ... Neither you nor the music possess any stage. There is no platform for adoration"
Continuous music is the music of small cafes, and quiet churches; it is a music for those who can really listen, who can sit with the sensation of their own time passing; the full majesty and impossibility of some of Lubomyr's pieces, the ones that leave me wrecked to hear them when I truly focus, or hear them live, goes in one ear and out the other, for many. And that is fine, and to be expected; and they are all good people. It can even go in one of my ears and out the other, when I do not give it my attention. Indeed, I do not listen to Lubomyr's music all that much, because I reserve it for when I can truly appreciate it.
When you do start to get good, 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. Once you understand the music is not about your audience, any childish (but fair and human) feelings of dismay or disappointment will go away. I recently performed at a Christmas fair, with children running around me and adults talking over my playing, with so much noise around - good noise, the noises of a community-spirit - but I had to quell that first feeling of sadness and shame, to be offering "my" music and have it "unappreciated", and I had to consciously conquer this feeling as I was playing. Someone even tried to cut my performance short. But even though I was there for them (and for Lubomyr) the music just simply was not about them; it was about the piano. There were a handful of those around to listen to it, and sit with it, and many who weren't. Let that be as it may. What was important was to give the piano its full sound and try to be faithful to the piece, and remain calm enough to allow the piece to develop organically and allow things to happen - and I ended up giving the most swift and fluid performance of that piece that I had ever given.
You will have to grapple with this question of what you have to display. Continuous music, if you want to take it seriously, will take years of learning and unlearning, and much of that time is limited by growth in your body that you simply cannot accelerate just by practicing more. What will you have to show for it? Nothing - because you are not trying to show. You will have to learn to find the joy of it in the way it feels in your hands; in the surprising overtones and overlapping rhythms which emerge from the piece, extra depth to the sound that you yourself did not put there; you will have to find calmness and control over the notes, be able to maintain them for hours at will and not be bored by it - then, then it is joyful, and you will learn. "Things to show for it" will come only as a side effect; be grateful to anyone who supports you, but do not look for them. Before you find the super-stunning abilities of Lubomyr, you will settle for less; you will sit with yourself - and only yourself - and with your own time (what the hell does that mean? I am using the word as Lubomyr uses it; see here for more).
"Let them [the hands] slip away unnoticed. Let them go. The song will continue, and that is most important. If it comes to that, let the hands vanish too... In the end, remain alone. Yourself, you will always be there. And perhaps something more. Find out how lonely we are. Play, by the reality of oneself. Find this one. Aloneness is much like Silence. There is no silence; there is no aloneness. There is always Existence. We are the perception of it"
You must figure out how to make the joy almost entirely yours. Your audience, if you have one, is just sharing in your joy as well as sharing in your music. That is a choice which is theirs, and only theirs, to make: you cannot be disappointed if they don't make that choice. Someone said to me, after my secondmost recent concert, exactly this; they appreciated my (experimental and, to them, alien) performance above all because they were moved by how much it moved me. To be clear, this is not an isolationist, self-absorbed, solipsistic philosophy: of course, Lubomyr (and I) enormously appreciate any audience. We are both people who love people. But, the music is inescapably personal, and this is a strength: this page exists to discuss motivation and demotivation, and forgive the cliché but 'realising I already had everything I needed', independently of how conventionally impressive the music was, how confident I felt in my technique or how receptive my audiences were, was important and took me far too long. The below quote is a favourite of mine, that I will likely reuse elsewhere on this site:
"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."
Story time: two nights ago, I played into the small hours of the night, practicing NKR-22 from the Lund St. Petri symphony for some four hours. For over half that time, I was playing the same bar. The same bar; can you imagine it? Was that not... boring? Simple? The notes were deceptively easy, and it was not hard to me to play through that bar once. When I tried to sustain the pattern, at any reasonable speed and in synchrony, I collapsed. I kept collapsing, until I found the true song. And years ago, I would have been frustrated and bitter - how incompetent must I be, to struggle with one bar after many hours? Anyone watching me would have been confused. But, reader, I cannot express how beautiful it was. This single bar, this "simple", static-position figure; when I brought the pace to a slow trickle, and found myself on its river, completely in the given moment, without bar lines or rhythmic marker, immersed in the song, and found that I finally "got it right" ; I cannot explain how happy I was - and "got it right" was not hitting the notes accurately: it was this particular feeling of having lost all feeling in my hands, this feeling of exact, rolling raindrops falling side by side; of a great separation yet an indistinguishability between the two hands, of hearing the tones emerge calmly, softly, not overstated, just so in sync with the calmness in my body, with the beat ticking along with my own time. There was also more to it, more in line with this, that I haven't mentioned here.
"If you are bored by the passage of time, you will be bored by this music. You who are not bored by the sensation of your existence will find a voice for your time"
I mention this to highlight there is something quite incredible in the continuous music of even a very simple figure. It is about the technique, the mindset, your relation with what's around you, far more than it is about what is written on the page. If you can believe in that, you can overcome the doubts raised in the first section of this subpage.
I mention this also because absolutely none of that could have been perceived by someone else, or properly put into words. I have tried, and only ask you to believe me that I am trying to describe something. Those 4 hours of my life were spent, mostly, trying to understand the continuum of one single bar. A simple thing! If you have the humility and patience for it, you too can and should find something like this in your playing of continuous music, some hidden thing to delight in that only you, currently, can feel. It is there, if you look for it; but look is the wrong word - it's more that you should be in a receptive frame of mind, able to find it when you cross its path. Even in the simplest pieces, such as Meditation 1-C, there is something to be found. When I first played that piece years ago, I would not have impressed anyone with the difficulty of the task; but the soft singing of Meditation 1-C was very joyful, in a basic way I could appreciate even then.
You will have to wallow in the sounds of a repeated, "simple" exercise; you will have to learn to hear it. You will play what seems like a wall of noise to most, and yourself be delighted it; not just by its sound, but the feeling of it in your fingertips and its presence in your mind, its shifting and surprising nature. When playing, most of the joy you will find is yours, inexplicable to anyone watching. You must remember this, and cherish it when you find it. No-one can take it away from you. For example, when you understand that speed is an emotion, and then find your hands moving far faster than they ever could had you tried, you will find a joy. And you will listen to your recording, realise it wasn't that fast, and you will not be dismayed - because what you felt was far more important than what the recording could show; showiness will come later.
No-one can take that from you, once you find it. You should try not to let you take it away from yourself. I stayed motivated through the early years, even when I felt inept or unmusical or bland, because a part of me knew that even these "simple" things I could do were now important, and meaningful - you have to find a way to understand that what you are doing is meaningful. So many people could also do what I was doing, with regards to playing the notes; I knew the same people could also sit with the music and play it in the same way (which is much harder to describe, but much more important), if they had the patience and humility for it - but they weren't, and I was; hopefully you, too, can sit with something like Meditation 1-C and not just blitz through the notes but find the time to really hear it, let your mind drift, and delight in the feeling. When you do, you will need no assistance in remaining motivated. I sometimes find it is good to come back to those first exercises - as they are easy for me now, there is a certain guilty pleasure coming from not having to struggle, but in their simplicity there is enough beauty to remind me why I am doing what I am doing.
Let me not be misleading and over-trivialising. The player can maintain more than just a simplicity, a never-ending little flux, however, and find joys that are visible to another. Just, probably not at first - and it will always be more amazing for you, the performer, than for your audience. Or maybe 'amazing' is the wrong word, because often you have already known what you are about to do.
You can learn to play with an unnatural fluidity. You can learn to play so fast and for so long that people will ask you, wide-eyed, about your stamina, not understanding that it was made easy and easeful; as I have said, you will eventually start to have these moments where you play faster than you actually can. You will learn to find a persistence of motion that, yes, others will be able to hear and be surprised by. Lubomyr, of course, has learned to play in such a way that renders me speechless.
But I implore you to understand that this should not be your goal. Instead, find a way to have respect even for the simple seeming things, and appreciation of the innate simplicity of the more complex things (and yes, you can hold these two 'incongruous' ideas in your head in a sane way; continuous music is already driven by and learned through incongruous patterns in the two hands).
"There's still hope because continuous music comes in a flash. So even though one might be doing something else, walking down the street, cutting the grass, picking apples, I don't know, something will speak, somehow, a flash will come silently in the body. And when they return to the piano they will be different, and their hands and fingers will be different. There is no one threshold, there's a constant growth of many small thresholds. And they depend on the devotion of the pianist .. not just to the music but the feeling within their body."
The above is also very, very true. I have experienced it multiple times. I have taken breaks as long as two months, struggling with a particular piece (Cloud Passade) and return from my holidays suddenly able to make immense progress; Lubomyr has experienced it, too. One should hold out hope for this. However, this should not encourage laziness! If you find peace during your break, think about music still, and exercise your hands somewhat - manual labour of any kind, or using handgrips such as the ones climbers use, to practice - then there is the possibility for sudden, inexplicable progress.
Let me finish with a passage from the introduction to Open Time:
"Let us say that we are setting out (in the present-day) to change the pitch of our voice. It has been for some time now at one pitch; steadily; that is good; it is a wonder to sing at this pitch. When a new pitch is given, let us sing with that one too. Perhaps some day we can sing with three or even four. Our voice could sing at one pitch; now it can sing at two; but the journey to reach this second one is no shorter than that which led us to the first.
No matter; we are always learning; our time is for learning; so let us learn well to sing with this second voice. One thing is sure: we never know when we have learned it. That is a strange thing; that, too, is a part of time. All we can know is that we have taken a step; certainly the view has changed; perhaps we can rest here and look at how far we've climbed. But do not be fooled into thinking that this step has put you at the summit. We are always facing away from the summit, out, with joy at the height; perhaps we can enjoy this altitude; far away we see other mountains; but they are not the mountain which we are climbing; that one we must take one step at a time, never knowing when and if we have reached the top.
...
No-one has yet mastered anything; even ourselves; because we are everything that matters.
No words can find this pitch for you; only practical discovery will; practising; we still do not know the meaning of this word; because it is understood as something painful; the sunlight, too, is painful to the mole (I suppose), but "painful" is not the essential meaning of the word, though sometimes it is that, for sure. Bring oneself to practise. Practise so that you can know again what you have seen yesterday; if you knew yourself yesterday, you must practise today to know that again; if you can do today what was done yesterday, then you are already doing it better; and it is no pain to meet again the old friend; keep him as a friend; you are older too.
So, I have forgotten this question I once asked about this voice; certainly I am still aware of questions; I just don't know how to ask. It has something to do with one step; not along a different way; it is still the same way; we are just one step farther along; let's not call this new; this taking of one more step; to take this little step, we must take many, many tiny-tiny steps; these tiny steps are deceitful; they look so terribly big every time; before, and after too. They, too, come and go in perspective. These steps are only as big as our reach can handle; the step of doing it is never "at-once"; because it is made up of many smaller steps, each along the way, to coming to reach that step; every step is immense; because we have done it.
It is neither hard nor easy; those words are meaningless in practice; what is hard cannot be done; only what is done is easy; therefore, simply do it."
I acknowledge that much of what is said here has been said before. The mountain-summit analogy is old, and I first heard it from my oldest friend. But I find it reassuring and humbling that even this ... star, let's say, that is Lubomyr, feels this same, normal way.