Lubomyr Melnyk

Half a century ago, when Lubomyr Melnyk was a starving Ukrainian immigrant in Paris, playing the piano during dance classes saved his life, generating just enough income that he might eat. Perhaps as importantly, the ideas he stumbled across while playing at those Paris Opera practices became his life’s work. “The dancers would move across the floor in long, unending, and repeated rows, and I had to create music for them,” he once told Rhythmplex. “I took Haydn and Terry Riley and put them together to create these unending spatial sounds.” These immersive spells of creation transformed Melnyk’s body and mind and steadily prompted a novel technique that he’s developed and taught ever since: Continuous Music.

Though his debut, KMH: Music in the Continuous Mode, earned little fanfare upon its release in the late ’70s, Melnyk continued to pursue his idea, refining his radiant trances until they could convey sorrow and hope, loss and nature itself. The key to his ecstatic minimalism is two nearly incongruous musical patterns in either hand, played so emphatically and rapidly that clouds of overtones allow them to merge, shift, and merge again. He has steadily gained acolytes during the last two decades, not only recording with the great British guitarist James Blackshaw but also working with the modern classical empire of Erased Tapes. Nearing 80, Melnyk makes music that shimmers with vitality and perseverance, testaments to his symbiotic relationship with the piano. His Big Ears performance is a rare North American treat.