Reading “Open Time”: pianistic bedtime stories with Lubomyr Melnyk, part (2) (on notation and rate)

Описание: We are going to be reading from “Open Time: the Art of Continuous Music”; this is part (2) of an experimental video series, not too unlike the ‘pockets of light tutorial’. Lubomyr has always valued philosophical ideas (on a spectrum from illuminating, poetic and mystical to quite radical and controversial) and has made it inextricable from the higher aspects of his technique. Unfortunately, almost all of these ideas are not publicly available, except for fragments given in his erratic interviews and deeply eccentric speeches between pieces at live concerts: if continuous music is going to survive, the depth of thought behind it must survive too.

This book was written in the ‘80s, privately published in 1987. It was back when Lubomyr still had hope people would take up his music, but it may be the case that I’m the only person to have seriously read it with the eyes of a student. Some 330 pages long, it is quite a journey, and impressively rich: though unmistakably in his style, it is written with the voice of a sharper and more strong-willed young man not yet struck by existential despair.

A common misconception is that Lubomyr simply enters a meditative trance, a flow-state, and has become very good at that and that alone. This is not so. I, myself, know how to find something like a flow-state, but it is all the additional complexity of Lubomyr’s thoughts and feelings on top of the flow-state which make him so brilliant and make most of his pieces outside of my reach - or anyone else’s - for the moment.