What's all this, then?

"Continuous music exists for two main reasons besides all the other very important elements that were there for its birth and creation: ... I loved the music, the sound of the music, and the sound of the piano that this was generating, because it was reveleaing a new world of sound, a new voice for the piano. There was another reason that people don't hear - because they cannot hear it, most people cannot hear it - that is the tremendous change in the physical act of playing the piano... I could feel it right away, as soon as the music was born. This was the birth of continuous music, the sensation of that energy in my body... I would say it has some familial relation to the energy of Tai Chi or Kung Fu... It made many changes and breakthroughs, breakthroughs into things that are unspeakable, that cannot be explained. One of the sad things - there's many sad things about my music, that make me quite hopeless - is that this music is impossible to play unless you have become a continuous pianist. People in concert don't realise this, at least the Europeans don't. In North America, I find it's even much worse; people hear only the music, they don't understand [at all] the miracle of it. It's as though I'm flying, around the room, like a butterfly or something, and in North America people don't see that butterfly, they say: 'oh I like the pattern of those wings... I enjoy the effect the music has on me' ... but they don't realise this butterfly is flying, even though it weighs 70 kilos.

It's very much like Trump, this disgusting evil monster in America, which everyone around the world can see, this monster, but everyone who waves his banner around think he's god and they're completely blind to many aspects which they don't register in their eyes and their ears at all... In Europe it's still somewhat of a problem, Ukraine is the only place where they perceive and recognise right away on stage - and these are not playing musical people, ordinary people on the street... I find it strange that my people, in my country they recognise it, but outside they don't see it. 

It's sort of like seeing somebody do Yoga, magical wonderful things and people looking at it and saying: 'oh yeah I can do that, give me a few days and I'll be able to do those positions'. Because it's music and continuous music has no building around it - yoga has a building around it: there's  a huge social knowledge and social awareness around it and preconception and everything like that - so people automatically recognise oh, that's gonna take years before I can achieve those positions. But with continuous music there is no building, no edifice, that people can stand and look at it with all these rooms, this mass of human consciousness which I call a building - which surrounds classical music, which surrounds Yoga, Tai Chi, Kung Fu, literature, Beethoven ... it's lacking in continuous music. For people, continuous music might as well be a hamburger a dressing on your hamburger, it has no meaning, it is something vague and unimportant."

(cont.)

"I know that the piano must not be limited to the voice that it has when it's playing Beethoven sonatas and Bach and rock and roll tunes and so on; it has a really, really nice voice when it's playing that sort of music, it's a nice voice - I'm not criticising this voice - but it's only a small part of the true voice of the piano.

If you think of it, that 400 years ago that people could never hear Pavarotti sing. Those who heard him are transfixed with the unspeakable undimensionable magnificence of his operatic voice - but this voice was impossible 400 years ago, nobody could sing like that... Everything seems to have started in Italy! All these schools, it all began in Italy, for some magnificent mysterious reason.

Someone, around 1800, discovered that they could create this - what we call the operatic voice. You and I, you know we can't sing like that, John Lennon and Paul McCartney and Dean Martin, great voices of history... people under 50 today have rarely heard [live] a great voice... we can't sing opera. We can sing, we can do the arias, but we don't have this strange mysterious difficult to develop quality of singing how it should sound. With the piano it's the same way, there's the regular voice, the voice that you and I might sing with, and then there is a discovery of the operatic voice of the piano, the continuous music voice, and 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. It's not just the loss of the voice of the piano, it's this beautiful thing of this incredible energy, it's not really energy, this energy which eventually transcends all physical matter... I want that this beautiful thing can be felt and live inside another human being.

There is this is power from the body, that is transmitted into the piano, and into the sound, and you hear it when I play... it's a real force. It's alive. It's really hard to talk about it in an intelligent way, with the lack of words and concepts. This is important because I feel the same thing about art; to express to somebody the beauty of a painting is really really hard, basically impossible. People either experience that beauty and see it or they don't; we don't have words for beauty, even though it's the most important thing for us."