Composer Lubomyr Melnyk explores new directions in contemporary music (03/31/96)

Composer Lubomyr Melnyk explores new directions in contemporary music

by Nestor Gula

TORONTO - Continuous music exists when the harmony becomes involved with the sound of the instrument. One of the main composers of continuous music is Lubomyr Melnyk, who, through his works for solo piano, two pianos, and piano quartets occasionally accompanied by small ensembles, explores new directions in contemporary classical music.

A listener of continuous music falls into a trance-like state. This, according to the composer, is exactly what the effect of continuous music should be. He explained that "the slowing harmonic change down has a twofold and contradictory process on the listener." The music slows the listener's metabolism down to a trance-like state, while at the same time awakening the mind and opening it up to hyper-speed activity.

Mr. Melnyk added that the effect on the audience and on him, as the performer, is nearly identical. "There is a state of almost near motionlessness, while at the same time the capacity to think and move the body enters the hyper-realm."

Mr. Melnyk was born in Munich and came to Canada when he was very young. He currently lives in Katrineholm, in central Sweden, with his wife Lesia and their son Lubko. Though he studied philosophy at the University of Winnipeg, he chose a career in music. He played piano with various dance groups and started to explore continuous music while he was living in Paris in 1974.

One of Mr. Melnyk's main inspirations was the music of Terry Riley, whose compositions frequently were based on continuous music. Mr. Melnyk said he wanted to adapt continuous music to the piano. He observed that when he started to develop the technique he encountered many technical problems but eventually mastered it. He also found that, "the tonality of music, which had seemed tired out and finished, acquired a vital new meaning."

The technique of continuous music requires that the performer play many notes, in arpeggio fashion, with one hand. In concert this ranges between 11 and 14 notes per second. The quickest Mr. Melnyk ever plays is about 19.5 notes per second, but he can keep this up only for about 15 seconds.

He started composing pieces and eventually wrote the 50.5 minute piece "KMH", which was recorded in 1979. Although he has made five more albums since that first one, the latest being "A portrait of Petlura on the Day He Was Killed," and countless tapes, he believes live performance is the way music must be heard.

"The live performance possesses the gift of reality; it is living, something we have forgotten in our day-to-day familiarity with the term 'live.' This reality is not possible from a recording." He scoffs at musicians who spend all their time perfecting their work in a studio, rarely venturing out to play concerts. "The sacred nature of music deems that it should be played live."

He says that he himself does not play concerts as often because "the concert possibilities are harder to find... Many places that feature contemporary music have disappeared." One of the reasons for this is that governments are putting a greater distance between themselves and the arts.

Toronto concert

Mr. Melnyk performed in concert on February 25 in Toronto's Music Gallery. The performance featured three new pieces by the composer, "The Riding and the Tale", "Triangle 14...19...22," and the premier performance of an excerpt of "It Was Revealed onto Us that Man Is the Center of the Universe, But Few Can Now Remember."

This latest work By Lubomyr Melnyk was commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's radio show "Two New Hours," which airs on Sunday's at 10:05 p.m. The concert will be broadcast on a future edition (the air date has not yet been determined).

"It Was Revealed..." is 110 minutes long and took one-and-a-half years to compose. The inspiration behind this work is the conflict between science and art. "Science has never, will never, and can never, come to grips with beauty or art," according to Mr. Melnyk.

He writes in the program notes for the Toronto performance that as science pushes the frontiers of knowledge, always seeking out more distant stars or delving into the heart of the atom, beauty and art are suppressed.

"Art does not exist in this world. It exists in our soul and in our psyche. It is beyond time, it is beyond space. It is smaller than the smallest and larger than the largest. Art and beauty are a gift... a gift to be treasured. Not a gift to be pushed aside by technology."

He states that man's obsession with machines that stretch the dimensions of space and time will not prevail over art and beauty because, "Beauty shall remain. Art will remain. Even after the world has ceased." Art and beauty will remain because after everything is gone, according to Mr. Melnyk, "the angels shall still be humming a tune...."

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