The Ukrainian-Canadian pianist and composer Lubomyr Melnyk has composed over 120 works, many of them for solo piano. With his Continuous Music, he has developed a form and playing technique since the 1970s that opens up infinite acoustic and emotional spaces: With the pedal pressed down and a flow of sound that never stops, he plays himself into a meditative state.
Influenced by American minimal music, especially representatives such as Steve Reich, Terry Riley and La Monte Young, Melnyk has developed an idiosyncratic piano style that has a transcendental effect. Melnyk now lives in Sweden and is regarded as one of the most important and exciting contemporary pianists and composers.
After studying classical piano and graduating with a degree in Latin and Philosophy from St Paul’s College in Winnipeg, in the early 1970s Melnyk found himself in Paris. Homeless and in desperate need of money, he supported himself by accompanying dance lessons for a company run by the experimental choreographer Carolyn Carlson.
The experience became a kind of epiphany: watching Carlson’s dancers, he began to play a new kind of music, spontaneous and improvisatory – responding not to rigid classical conventions but the dance he saw unfolding. Using the sustain pedal to create echo and reverb, he transformed free-flowing cascades of notes into hypnotic waves of sound. Eventually he found a name for this new style: ‘continuous music’, which he uses to this day.
Melnyk composes, as he plays, at the piano, feeling out lines and individual rhythmic cells that bubble, undulate and gradually expand into vast, interlinked frameworks. Asked to describe what it’s like to live inside his music, he says “my whole body is transformed as I play, it honestly feels like that. My fingers feel like the winds of the world; it feels like you’re physically transcending dimensions.”
