July 10, 2004
WHERE ARE VANDALS WHEN YOU NEED THEM:
639-Year-Long Performance of John Cage's As Slow As Possible Adds Two Notes (Matt Surman, 7 July 2004, Associated Press)
In an abandoned church in the German town of Halberstadt, the world's longest concert moved two notes closer to its end Monday [5 July]: Three years down, 636 to go.The addition of an E and E-sharp complement the G-sharp, B and G-sharp that have been playing since February 2003 in composer John Cage's Organ2/ASLSP — or Organ squared/As slow as possible.
Ute Gabriel looks in on the organ in the St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany, where the performance of John Cage's 'As Slow As Possible' will end in 636 years. (AP file photo) The five notes are the initial sounds played on a specially built organ — one in which keys are held down by weights, and new organ pipes will be added as needed as the piece is stretched out to last generations.
The concert is more than just an avant-garde riff on Cage's already avant-garde oeuvre, which includes a piece consisting of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence and one [sic] for a piano rejiggered with screws and wood stuck between the strings.
"It has a philosophical background: in the hectic times in which we live, to find calm through this slowness," said Georg Bandarau, a businessman who helps run the private foundation behind the concert. "In 639 years, maybe they will only have peace."
The concert began Sept. 5, 2001 — the day Cage would have turned 89.
One would like to believe that a week later they'd have been too ashamed of themselves to start such a trivial and self-indulgent exercise. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 10, 2004 9:02 AM
I say we start a pool as to when this thing will be abndoned and forgotten.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at July 10, 2004 1:20 PMLet's see - at 2 seconds and one inch per measure, and 36 inches per page, the sheet music will require only 275 million pages. Did Cage write it out by hand? Now that would have been one of his most useful tasks.
Posted by: pj at July 10, 2004 4:01 PMpj -- perhaps he had 500 simian amanuenses do the writing.
Posted by: old maltese at July 10, 2004 6:20 PMAt least this appears to have been composed, which cannot be said of some of his work (if you glorify it with that term).
One of Cage's piano pieces ("Variations IV", I think) was written on six sheets of mylar, three of which have lines drawn on them and three of which have dots on their surface. The pianist prepares the score by flinging the sheets in the air and interpreting them however he chooses.
Cage has his moments but if you are looking for traditional melodies, you are best served by his SONATAS AND INTERLUDES FOR PREPARED PIANO (1949), a gorgeous set of Satie-style miniatures.
Posted by: John Barrett Jr. at July 10, 2004 9:31 PMAre there any lyrics?
Posted by: Genecis at July 11, 2004 11:14 AMLyrics to SONATAS AND INTERLUDES? No, they are piano instrumentals, although they have multiple "voices" - they are written for an instrument Cage called the "prepared piano", on which screws, metal plates, and other objects are placed on certain piano keys, resulting in buzzing or clunking noises when those keys are struck. Basically, it was a low-tech synthesizer about twenty years before the earliest attempts (barring things like the theremin) at electronic music - and the Satie-style melodies give the sonatas a charm lacking in much of Cage's music.
If ORGAN2/ASLAP has lyrics I can just imagine the thrill that would come when a singer actually completed a word. (What is the point in even performing this thing? Aside from electronic storage there is no way to record the full piece, nor can anyone ever listen to it all - the mind boggles.) You'd get to see the singers age before your eyes, there'd be new performers on the side waiting to take place of a singer who dies ... whether from exhaustion or boredom would be hard to determine. The only way you could do it would be to sample the singers' voices and have a slow-playing tape running next to the slow-playing organ. I'm not sure if there's a point to all this - except the point on the head of the guy who's sponsoring the concert!
Posted by: John Barrett Jr. at July 11, 2004 10:28 PM