Page 14 - IAV Digital Magazine #588

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Organ Is Playing A 639-Year-Long Song. It Just Changed Chords For the First Time In 2yrs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBZ-3Ob9-7k
An organ tasked with playing a musical composi- tion “as slow as possible” is living up to the chal- lenge. It just changed chords— for the first time in two years.
Crowds gathered at a church in Halberstadt, Germany, this week to observe the instrument as volunteers added a pipe to slightly alter its song. The wooden-framed organ is currently 23 years into a performance of American compos- er John Cage’s “Organ2/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible).”
Set up and main- tained by the John Cage Organ Foundation, the piece began play- ing in 2001 and will conclude in 2640—over 600 years from now. As BBC
News writes, “Looking at that period of time in the other direc- tion—the Renaissance was starting to rumble into existence in Europe.”
Cage, who died in 1992, was known for his experimen- tal works. He once wrote a composi- tion entitled “4’33”,” which calls for four minutes
and 33 seconds of musicians’ silence. His
1987 debut perfor- mance of “ASLSP” in Metz, France, lasted just under 30 minutes. Later renditions have been even slower, such as Diane Luchese’s 2009 performance of the work, which lasted nearly 15 uninter- rupted hours. The Halberstadt per- formance, though, outdoes any other.
As NPR’s Rob Schmitz reports, when the John Cage Organ Foundation—a group of profes- sors, scholars and theologians—gath- ered in the late
’90s to plan the longest possible performance of “ASLSP,” they dis- agreed about how to honor Cage’s wishes.
“They said, ‘Oh, the organist must sometimes go to the loo or some- times to eat,’” foundation mem- ber Rainer Neugebauer tells NPR. “And then one person—he was a theolo- gian—said, ‘No, the organist must play until he dies from the seat.’”
The group eventu- ally decided to place small sand- bags on the organ’s keys. They also set a compo- sition runtime of 639 years: the length of time between the year 2000 and the 1361 construction of the world’s first 12- tone Gothic organ in Halberstadt. The city offered up St. Burchardi Church, an 11th-century convent, to house the performance, and it began on September 5, 2001—Cage’s 89th birthday.
The organ’s sound has been sus- tained for so long
because of careful engineering. The instrument is “a work in progress,” writes NPR. “It’s being built as the piece progresses, with metal pipes added or taken away with each chord change.” The bellows are powered by elec- tricity—connected to a backup gener- ator—and their winds are carried to the organ via an underground pipe.
Cage’s minimalist work influenced many artistic fields, as Allan Kozinn wrote in his New York Times obituary. The composer col- laborated with musicians, artists and choreogra- phers—
notably, Merce Cunningham—and his ability to exper- iment garnered esteem.
In Halberstadt, the long performance of “ASLSP” honors Cage’s legacy by taking his “as slow as possible” direc- tive as seriously as possible. This week’s chord change is the 16th to occur in the per- formance so far, reports ARTnews’ Karen K. Ho, tak-
ing place exactly two years after the previous chord change, which rang out on February 5, 2022. According to the foundation’s web- site, eager listen- ers will need to wait another two and a half years to hear the next change in sound, which is scheduled to take place on August 5, 2026.
Neugebauer recalls the organ’s period of quiet at the beginning of the performance, which was calcu- lated as the pro- portional length of a pause at the start of Cage’s piece: “In the beginning of the first part, for 17 months, you came in here and heard only the bellows,” he tells NPR. The team later realized they’d miscalculat- ed, and the silence should have lasted 28 months.
“I’m 99 percent sure that John Cage, if he’s sitting on a cloud some- where, would say, ‘Oh, it's good,’” Neugebauer tells NPR. “He would laugh about the mistakes we’ve made.”
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