The Continuous Shrine - Who, and why, am I?

I don't want to completely doxx myself or say every little detail of my life, but it's worth explaining a "little" something about who I am and how I came to follow Lubomyr, and find myself dedicating a YouTube channel and website to his music. I am not vain enough to believe anyone outside of my family will really care for this whole spiel, and I have written most of it out of whimsy and sentiment (and because I just simply like to write), but the most important things I want to stress here are that:

(1) Musically, I am nothing special, and if you're reading this there's a reasonable chance your base pianism skills considerably exceed what mine were when I started and:

(2) It sounds cheesy, but it is absolutely true that a little discipline, perseverance, love, emotional maturity and an open mind can take you very far indeed.

I have noticed, at every concert, that a great many attendees, if not all, appreciate his music and are moved, yet almost none are moved to take up the music for themselves. I suspect the most significant reason for this is that the music appears unapproachable; the purpose of this site, and "my story", is to say that this is not true. I have felt as if it were true very many times, but it pays to not give into such whisperings. Lubomyr's music requires a lot of work, but I did not chain myself to the keyboard for 5 hours every day and steel myself like some well-trained conservatoire boy to come "as far" (which is and isn't a lot) as I have. It is fair to say the average amount of time that I have practiced per day, ranging over all my days since discovering him, is less than half an hour.

A TLDR might be that I'm a university student, a proud but surprised music scholar, even, and joint head of my college music society, trying to use my increasing access to the wizarding world (through the internet and my university) to promote Lubomyr's music, to fly his flag, and to study it and perform it. I have been a student of Lubomyr's for some four and half years now (at the time of writing, the Christmas morning of 2024) and have been immensely privileged to know the man, to be inspired by his live genius but also his astounding humility and warmth - like many old men, he is the friendliest old man you'll ever meet - and grateful to be someone he cares about and is proud of. I unironically have to pinch myself to remind myself that this situation is real.

Unfortunately I seem to be his only student who is very active online. I am not glad of this position. This places a burden on me, since I now have a certain skill and knowledge that either (1) very few people have or (2) no-one else wants to advertise. In either scenario, it falls on me to put Lubomyr's stuff out there, as inexpertly as I can manage. I am creating this website partially motivated by the terror of thinking this music will be lost forever, which is not an implausible scenario. To be clear: if anyone knows of other students or pianists who are following Lubomyr's music, or who have very similar skills, please let me know, and I will be overjoyed.

He has had a few other students, and I'll name the ones I know: Ell Kendall, Matthew Thomasson, and Hauschka, the first two of whom I met in the flesh as the opening acts to one of his concerts and there is also Eva Mitreikina, who published a few short, and old, videos on YouTube; they are all musicians in their own right. They all are certainly better pianists than I, and listening to the first two of them play it was, at times, obvious that they had been influenced by Lubomyr, but for the most part it seems they are now doing their own thing, musically speaking. I know of only one other student who has begun to study Lubomyr's Arpegge technique.

The sequel is a more detailed answer to "who am I?", as it pertains to music. I have broken this up by colour-coded sections, and first mention Lubomyr after the blue.

I'm a young adult, now, and first started piano lessons when I was seven. I really wasn't the best student - I was quite lazy, and often quite unmotivated, enjoying the sense of skill in some part and enjoying the ABRSM pieces, sometimes, though "Fur Elise" was always my favourite, and the first piece of piano music to cause me to shed a tear. I am endlessly grateful to my family, in particular my father, for putting some gentle pressure on me to continue with piano despite being thoroughly mediocre and only intermittently interested in it; I am endlessly grateful to my former teacher, who I had on and off for 7 years - Michael, if you're reading this, I thank you for your patience and for giving me a solid grounding in the piano and music theory, and for imparting some vague sense of discipline too. Looking back, I think it's the clinging to a sense of discipline that kept me going. I did some musical things with my school, aye; I did my Music GCSE early, which was a fun social thing but otherwise a bit disappointing (in particular, I was dreadful at composition), and sometimes I'd perform for the class, or perform at concerts in my primary school (back when everything was low-stakes), but I'd be rather uninspired and uninspiring in said performances. This, by the way, is completely fine - we cannot impose high standards on our younglings - but I mention it to highlight how I felt rather dreary, whereas now piano is an essential part of my life and among the few things I am genuinely proud of, and while my self-opinion is always a bit complicated the opinions of others make it quite clear that something wonderful is happening, now.

Anyway, back to back then: parents and friends are always nice, seeking to be uplifting and to parade little Jimmy's music where possible, but I never enjoyed listening to myself play and was damn sure no-one else truly did too. I barely scraped through grades 1-5, and then my piano teacher went off to university and the world came to a pause with the COVID pandemic, so that was the end of my formal training. The lockdown encouraged me to find some music worth listening to, ere I lost my mind, and I found myself rather enjoying (some of) the works of Philip Glass. I bought a few scorebooks, and played through some of his 20 Etudes and the metamorphoses, particularly enjoying "Opening" and "Mad Rush". Etudes 12, 16, 17, and 18 are good too. I got somewhat good at these, and I must respect those 20 Etudes for keeping my fingerwork at an acceptably mediocre level. During this time, I very fortuitously developed the habit of playing, and practicing, with my eyes closed. I also learned the art of self-teaching, which any student of continuous music must appreciate (even those as lucky as I am, to have known and met and befriended its founding legend, Lubomyr). I also enjoyed the piece "Mishima: closing" (the piano arrangement of it) and "Evening song (Satyagraha)".

A formative moment: my mother's friend, Liz, had a terminal cancer. The very last thing Liz ever heard from my mother, before their assisted death, and possibly the last thing she ever heard entirely, was my piano playing. Paralysed with tears, on the phone, my mother asked me to play something, anything, anything at all, and she recorded it in a voice message (over WhatsApp). I played Opening, and Mishima Closing, barely keeping it together myself. This was the second time in my life that I had shed a tear while performing. From then on, I had some strange sense that no matter what came next, my playing had meant something, even if it was not much, and this nugget of confidence - and also this sense that the piano can mean something - stayed with me. I could never stop, and dragged myself to the stool as much as I could, in those dark and hilarious pandemic years. I kept coming back to Mad Rush, as a piece that meant something to me, and Mishima Closing - while I don't play it so much anymore - will forever be in my heart; a funeral song. I got good enough at Mad Rush to catch the eye of my godfather, James, who is an avid Philip Glass fan, and I must thank him, too, for his endless encouragement.

Throughout that, though, I just did a lot of gaming, the occasional bit of extracurricular maths and some haphazard pandemic schoolwork. The games Gris, Sword and Sworcery, and BELOW were real staples of that period (honourable mention to 'Hexcells') - do check them out. I was locked in on maths from the ages of 7 until 10, learned a bit of calculus and physics far too early at the age of 12, supported by my family to "be scientific", but English was my first and enduring love. I only returned in seriousness to mathematics in my late teens, discovering the Mathematics Stack Exchange and enjoying an unusually swift rise, with a serious passion, taking copious notes and self-studying a chunk of my university degree ahead of time. I'm rather inactive now, but will be forever proud of my learning and teaching as "FShrike". Now, I note it feel as if I spend more time thinking about, and doing, music than I do thinking about mathematics - how things change.

Before, in my Catholic primary school, I loved creative writing above all else, and I take this moment to thank (my family and) the teachers Rachel and Sam for fostering this. I emphasise Catholic because experience with spirituality, in any of its myriad guises, is important. In secondary school, I was unusual in seriously enjoying religious studies and considering it one of my favourite classes - shoutout to Kenichi. I am essentially agnostic now (once, I was a cringeworthy Dawkins-type atheist - forgive the follies of youth - but I have never actually been religious) and part of my "creative writing" was indeed pretending to be Catholic, when we wrote little explorations of feeling or attempts at mentalising Jesus etc. for religion class, and I was never suspected. I remember being quite bemused and guiltily pleased when my religion-book was offered as a shining example to a local inspector, one time. This pretense was not malicious, or mocking. It was earnest. I loved the Catholics around me, because they were people and I have always loved people, even if I haven't always realised it, and whatever I thought about their beliefs, the essential morals they were getting at were ones I broadly agreed with, and the rest of the ceremony and storytelling was ... just that. This early experience did teach me to have a certain kind of open mind which, in some ways, has helped with Lubomyr's music. On a vaguely similar note, I was an only child, used to a kind of loneliness (this brings no judgement to bear on my parents: siblinghood has its inevitable advantages and disadvantages) and used to the sound and feel of my own head, used to learning to coexist with myself - this is also relevant.

What about Lubomyr? With my father and stepmother, I have always watched a lot of TV. In particular, we have done Star Trek to death (watching the full Voyager sequence twice). During the first half of 2020 school was out thanks to the pandemic, so you can be sure we watched even more TV then. My stepmother had the genius to recommend "Mare of Easttown", which is an amazing detective-crime-thriller-drama in its own right, and the very first episode features a very special song, at the end, coming on just before and while the credits roll. The same song is also played at the end of the final episode. The piece was "Pockets of Light", by Lubomyr Melnyk. I discuss this piece ad nauseam here, on this site. I heard only the first two minutes, but really in the first thirty seconds my jaw dropped. It's funny - the piece itself is not even that musically complex, not that melodic or striking or "difficult", though it is all of these things, but my mind was blown. There are many other pieces that would have been even more devastating, but Pockets of Light was the one. See, as you know (!) I had been getting into Philip Glass, and my ear was attuned to minimalistic repetitions of simple chord-patterns and the like (be careful to understand that seriously likening Glass to Melnyk is a kind of heresy, deeply erroneous, fit only for cursory inspection of certain pieces) which in some sense feature in Pockets of Light (the first tone is G-E-G-E-G-E-G-E-... ringing softly, alone in the right hand, and then a simple base C-G-E-G-C-G-E-G-... triad appears, and it gently develops with simple left hand triads) so my first thoughts were along the lines of ~ "oh huh, this is a bit like Glass, innit?" ~ but very quickly I was left speechless by the overlapping tones, the impossible-sounding sub-melodies and sub-rhythms, the emergent depth of the song beyond the notes (none of which I understood at the time, but I heard their shadow and was in awe) and immediately looked Lubomyr up, after the credits rolled and his name was mentioned.

I think I was quite lucky to have my ear in an unusually sensitive state; it's easy to not hear the things I heard, and many times throughout my study my motivation and appreciation of Lubomyr's music has waned, as well as waxed, and I have forgotten how to hear these things. This mundane event (the hearing of an extract of a pleasant piece of music at the end of a pleasant show) changed my life. I found the full piece on Spotify, listened to it a fillion times, and excitedly shared it with my three most talked-to friends, at the time (only one of the three remains: thank you, Shane). I was quite starry eyed. I remember sitting on my bed and just repeating it again and again, not moving, staying up (as I am now) until 3am at least.

What happened immediately after that, I'm not sure, but I had a burning curiosity. I explored a lot of his music on YouTube (though, really, this was a fraction of his oeuvre), found that I liked some of it, didn't like a lot of it (!) (at the time - the music is an acquired taste) but was shocked to the core by some. I believe "Beyond Romance" and "Cloud No. 81" left me most in awe, at the time - I can happily say that I know one of these pieces, now: see here. Then, I found on his old website a reference to the fact that he offers lessons, and found that he also had a published scorebook - perhaps the best £35 I have ever spent. I learnt the notes to Pockets of Light (a version thereof) over the period of a month (really, it's not too hard: the individual notes shouldn't trouble a pianist beyond ABRSM Grade 6 level, say, but it took another two, arguably three years, before I could really say I could play the piece, and my appreciation of this piece still improves to this day) and excitedly sent an email to Lubomyr, fawning somewhat (how many people get to have a conversation with their idols?) and I attached a recording I had taken, of my performance. It was quite a horrible performance, but I didn't realise why at the time - my classical understanding left me with the impression I kinda knew the piece well, kinda (I didn't).

Lubomyr responded with a very sweet email, which I have still saved, above all grateful for my interest, but warmly-sternly noted that my fingers were not "functioning", and that I was greatly out of sync. I had my first lessons with him (online) soon after that, paid for by my family as a reward for having done well with my GCSE predicted grades, or something like that. My family was initially a bit perplexed - when your son asks to meet with an unknown old man he found on the internet, you raise your eyebrow, and when this old man is a world-class superstar, you raise it even higher. But they supported it, and I have had intermittent lessons for the next four years ever since. Honestly, there haven't been that many. The total number is likely less than 40. Simply having this human contact, however, having a voice telling you things, even things you perhaps thought you already knew, and having the warm encouragement of a legend, is extremely influential. I often noted after a lesson that I would magically play better, even if I couldn't attribute this improvement to any particular thing the man had said. Faith in the possibility of it is crucial. Of course, I cannot have faith I will do what Lubomyr does, but being in conversation with him helped me to have faith I could do something. Lubomyr has an excellent patience and keenness to uplift his students, which I share in my own (mathematics) tutoring and greatly admire in a legend like him. Be sure I could not have so easily received tutelage and encouragement from my former idol, Philip Glass.

I saw him, for the first time, in concert the same year, after just a few months of lessons. I had become confident in the first of the "meditations" . We had a lesson in the concert venue, which is where the photo on the home page was taken. I remember walking in and finding that the venue staff were baffled, maybe even ready to throw me out, at the notion Lubomyr was holding a lesson (with an obviously unskilled student, no less) just hours before his performance. He’s chill like that. The lesson was good fun, a little surreal, and productive. He thanked my parents profusely for supporting me in this music, and (sorry, Michael) I remember him asking us: “so for how long has he had classical lessons?” and when we said “7 years”, he shook his head ruefully. He also mentioned, off the cuff, that Pockets of Light - of which I was so enamoured - was completely improvised. I would spend the next three years essentially working towards a good understanding of a piece the man trotted out on some random afternoon, with little to no forethought.

The concert performance wrecked me, Butterfly leaving me tearful and Windmills leaving us all stunned beyond words, knowing for the first time just how special he is and how essential it is that this music be preserved, a feeling which has never left me. Between pieces, I experienced his warm bedside manner, where he somewhat erratically speaks about this and that before a piece, sometimes introducing it and sometimes giving us a sweet nothing; I remember him talking about how good it is to smoke a pipe, prime numbers and relationships. I instantly liked him more for this. Modulo a discussion of a certain TV show, he did, however, coherently introduce Windmills and the backstory behind the piece was excellent context (I had heard, but not warmed to, recordings of the piece before).

Before university, I only saw him one other time since that day. The End of the World concert. Until I saw him again, this year, I had never cried so much in my conscious life. I say more about it in the link. We had a lesson at the venue that time, too, and my mother got to enjoy some of his eccentricities as well. He spoke of Fermat's last theorem and Apple and wretched technologies, and gave a very moving lesson on the piece "Butterfly", which I hate myself for not having recorded. That was an amazing day, but I still grappled frequently with low motivation and naysaying of my own skills, this feeling that the task ahead was insurmountable. How could I know the notes to Barcarolle, and play them for him, live, and still fumble, still produce a fairly soulless sound? To this day, I don't feel as if I really know the piece.

But it is extremely dangerous to compare yourself with Lubomyr, who has been playing the piano for decades more than you have (probably) at a uniquely advanced level. I just had to keep plodding along with the meditations, Pockets of Light, and my own life. The most significant turning points were yet to come. I also struggled with a sense of guilt. How can I be one of a handful of students of the one who I feel is the greatest pianist ever, and a lovely man who likes me to boot, and not make something of it? How can I not practice furiously each and every day? I have come to understand the value of patience with this music more, and even Lubomyr has admitted that sometimes taking a true break, of potentially even months, can be very helpful. The hand and mind need time to mature and this doesn't always require the stimulus of the ivory keys.

The pandemic ended and I had to deal with my final years of school. I was never supported by the school in playing Lubomyr’s music, but stole what access I could to the practice and stage pianos (my first videos on my YouTube channel were taken sneakily during some lunchtimes) and tried to keep a good schedule. At school I had the chance to experience many different pianos; often dismayed with what I perceived as quite stiff keys on my home piano, the old and terrible pianos in the practice rooms had keys so light that I could really move, without needing much technique, giving a false sense of mastery but a very important sense of speed and sound, a sound which leaked through the walls and often caused annoyed teachers to tell me to be quieter: only once did someone stop to say they actually thought it was interesting, but this is not a problem.

It was very important for my motivation that I could go to school and know what it is like to feel speeds I struggled to match on my home piano - it gave me a clearer sense of what I was working towards. Be sure that attaining speed is not the goal, but every student wants to go fast no matter how many times they’re told not to, and in continuous music that feeling of easefully playing fast, faster than you even expect or consciously know how to manage, is an important feeling to understand and use (but not chase): on speed.

I also had my first " mystical " experiences in those school practice rooms. I place the word in quote marks, in an attempt to offend as few people as possible (related). Much more recently, during a teaching internship, I followed my previous suit and used the music practice rooms in this unfamiliar school, for 20 minutes at most, at a time, practicing the Circular Etudes (akin to the Meditations but significantly more advanced). I had similar experiences then, with a much greater frequency and intensity. There is something about these old leaky and resistance-less, yielding pianos that just let you flow and lose your mind to a whirlwind of "over"-sustained sound, importantly also situated in the warm, human environment of a caring school (shoddy practice rooms still witness the growth of the generations), that is very appealing and very conducive to experimentation with new technique, especially new technique which requires a currently unattained degree of strength. Back then, these "experiences" were very few and far between.

I had very few - no more than five - such experiences in the comfort of my own home, in those first three years (these days, I am grateful to know them as a familiar friend). Aside from the very occasional morale boost when my interpretation of this music managed to mean something to someone else, these very occasional 'experiences' reminded me that, in fact, Lubomyr knows what he's talking about, when he talks a bit mystically, and that I can have a taste of these possibilities. These experiences were so mind-bending for me, and in some ways still are, that my very rational mind couldn't let go of them, and when demotivated I could just think ~ "perhaps I should keep playing, so that I might feel that again" ~ whatever the hell 'that' was. As well as demotivation

My friends started to get a sense that I was doing something unusual, and someone else referred to me as ‘fingers guy’ (or something like that) after I spent a whole lesson trying to tap the rhythms to the Butterfly 6-note climb in synchrony. I gave a performance of Pockets of Light and Butterfly for some of them, maybe two years into Lubomyr’s music now, which can’t have been too good but their reactions were extremely heartening. Good people invite good music. I gave a performance of Pockets of Light again on one of the last days of school, to many more people, which was very silly with people flashing lights in my face and dancing and kicking tables around. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Finally, I gave a performance for the leavers’ concert, with my old friends from the music GCSE, and their reactions were extremely moving; I will not forget that. In those early years, I had just a few “concerts”, period, and in the in-between there was a serious need for self-motivation and patience. Despite all my nerves and limited skill, the music could still move people.

This is a feature of the music, not a feature of mine. It is sufficiently unique and striking, enveloping the audience, that even a patchy rendition can grip a receptive person. Outside of school, I had a similar experience performing Pockets of Light and Butterfly in the wonderful Druidstone hotel, where all the staff came in to listen and one of the guests lay underneath the piano. I still cannot really play Butterfly, and the piano was a little old and out of tune, but still this music had that power.

I slowly began to have experiences like this more often. At university, I joined the music society and have performed in every single one of the student concerts. Forcing myself to confront a larger and rather sophisticated audience has been very good for me, a sort of trial by fire. The very first of these concerts, I was more nervous than I had ever been (for something with low stakes). I gave of Pockets of Light with arms trembling like leaves, though I am told that no-one noticed. This is always the way. In the second and third, I trembled again, this time with no conscious nerves, and it was only on the most recent one, the fourth (technically the fifth, since there was a small affair to audition for my scholarship) that I avoided nerves entirely during the performance. I again want to reference this. There were always a handful of people who were moved. In particular, I am grateful for the encouragement of Dr. Binns and the Junior Dean, (soon-to-be!) Dr. Russell. Lubomyr has struggled to win the hearts of figures from the music establishment, so it is an honour to have that experience. I gained enough confidence from these concerts to stabilise my position and realise I could and would dedicate consistent and serious time to the continuous music, though my practice continued to be a little patchy. I had almost no lessons in my first year of university, too.

Then I took some friends to see him, just before our exams. It had been two years since I had heard him live, and I had almost forgotten how warm his character is, in the flesh. In some random chicken and chips shop, my mother and he sat next to each other and talked about old TV shows and vinyls. This concert caused most of my friends to think Lubomyr was somewhat insane, albeit incredible, and hit me like a truck. Again, I was moved to cry - to cry silently. My throat was raw, my eyes were raw, my head was raw. This, of course, lent fuel to the fire. After the concert I saw him carrying around a little yellow book, titled "The 22 Circular Etudes", and bought it from him. This book is really excellent, and it is a shame it is not yet more widely published. I can only play three of these etudes, the first two of which I practiced seriously over the summer break. At the same time, I bought what seems to have been the last publicly available copy of his treatise, Open Time. The circular etudes, and this book, became my obsession, and that summer (this summer) I made the most progress I had ever made with the piano, with a momentum that continues today.

Certain objective developments brought on by the etudes, namely a kind of strength and many wonderful 'experiences', as well as the great personal insight I found in the book (it helped me to understand him just as much as it helped me to understand the music, and these are the same) which elaborated and corrected things I had previously heard him speak of and introduced ideas which I could mutter to myself and watch play out in flesh and real time, as I explored these Etudes, and I really felt the obvious point: he does know what he's talking about. It sounds silly to say, but this was driven home, now hammered indelibly into my psyche. He has said a lot of things, a lot of things which make him sound crazy to some. I often held some scepticism but had faith that there was truth enough to be found there, and this summer I began to find some of that truth. And it makes the music so much better, so much easier. My passion for the music and my fervour in collecting and preserving it increased steadily, my progress in the music surprised even Lubomyr.

He wrote a score for the pre-existing piece "Cloud Passade No. 3", and I witnessed such an obvious progression, initially finding the piece agony after just thirty seconds of play and in a month finding it a breeze (or thinking that I did) after a hiatus, a holiday or two, and then finding ever more liquid and easeful; it is certainly my favourite piece, now, and what I have been able to do with it, the speed I have been able to find, and the surrounding 'experiences' (of which there have been many), all confirm the correctness of Lubomyr's teachings. I was recently lucky enough to present this piece to an audience of Ukrainians, and, as always, move just a handful of them. I cannot emphasise enough, or really convey, just how meaningful it was for me to read this book, to understand this was also a book almost no one possessed and fewer still had bothered to read, to scan the book, study it, peruse it, take notes on quotes from it, sit with the ideas and then see and feel these ideas in myself. Hearing things Lubomyr had been saying to me for years many times, many ways, in his poetic and whimsical writing style, iterated across 300 pages, brought the points home in a way that was impossible, before.

The knowledge that almost no one had, or has, the privilege of reading this book and being in a suitable position to read this book, weighed on my mind. The final straw was editing Lubomyr's Wikipedia page and having all my edits revoked, because I lacked any citations. Indeed, there was nothing I could cite (but I would love to be wrong about that). What I have learned and experienced seems to not be "out there", so I now find myself doing this. On the miniscule chance that you have read through all of this, I thank you, and hope this page provided ample context for the existence and nature of this site, and gave a sense of my journey as a student.