A really long piece of music
The John Cage Organ Project in Halberstadt is going another 619 years
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In early morning, my bride and I wait for the sun to rise and catch up on the news, trying our best not to doom-scroll. I regularly check out a couple of German newspapers, and in early February I ran across an article in Die Zeit: “John Cage: Abschied vom gis.” I dove in, fully expecting I’d enter a rabbit hole.
John Cage is perhaps best known for a piece first performed in August 1952 in the Maverick Concert Hall near Woodstock, New York. Named 4'33" — which Cage usually called “Four Thirty-Three” not “Four Minutes and Thirty-Three Seconds” — the three-movement work consists of silence. Well, perhaps not exactly silence, but at least an absence of sounds played by the pianist. Kyle Gann recounted the work’s premier this way:
Pianist David Tudor sat down at the piano on the small raised wooden stage, closed the keyboard lid over the keys, and looked at a stopwatch. Twice in the next four minutes he raised the lid up and lowered it again, careful to make no audible sound, although at the same time he was turning pages of the music, which were devoid of notes. After four minutes and thirty-three seconds had passed, Tudor rose to receive applause….
Ever since, it’s been a circus, I guess you could say.
Cage lost friends because of the work. Recalling the reception of performance at the Maverick, he said, “They didn’t laugh — they were irritated when they realized nothing was going to happen, and they haven’t forgotten it thirty years later: they’re still angry.” Once the dust settled, others began to see the work differently — a matter of reframing musical experience and opening up new vistas of musical composition and performance. 4'33" is indeed “something to listen to,” and each performance is in a sense quite unique. It calls upon the audience to listen to the sounds of the venue, their own sounds of disgust, confusion, and protest, their coughs, murmurs, shuffling feet, resettling in chairs. In the first performance at Maverick Hall in the woods, the performance sensitized ears to the environmental sounds of the rustic hall and of the surrounding woods, with winds blowing through the late summer’s trees.
Cage like it.
I think perhaps my own best piece, at least the one I like the most, is the silent piece. It has three movements, and in all of the movements there are no sounds. I wanted my work to be free of my own likes and dislikes, because I think music should be free of the feelings and ideas of the composer. I have felt and hoped to have led other people to feel that the sounds of their environment constitute a music which is more interesting than the music which they would hear if they went into a concert hall.
Cage looked back on 4'33" as a turning point. As Gann noted, “Cage talked about 4'33" as his most important work, the one he returned to again and again as the basis for his other new works.”
Cage is widely considered the most influential American composer of the twentieth century.
Another work, played “As Slow As Possible”
Cage’s 4'33" has had an influence that outlasted its premier in the Maverick. But its durable influence is matched by another very durable performance that has been going on for over twenty years and is supposed to continue for another 619 years, without intermission. If all goes as planned, the last tone will be heard on September 4, 2640.
It’s taking place in the Burchardi Church in Halberstadt, Germany, and began on what would have been Cage’s 89th birthday, September 5, 2001. It’s called the John Cage Organ Project and is based on his ORGAN^2/ASLSP. (By the way, I use a carat “^” since the Substack editor doesn’t support superscripts.) Each of the nine movements of the performance is supposed to last 71 years. You can see the progression of chord changes in the first movement and hear the most recent tone on the ASLSP website (https://aslsp.org/klaenge.html). The project website characterizes the changes like those between tones in a machine room and Hamburg’s harbor (Ein Sound, der zwischen Maschinenraum und Hamburger Hafen changiert).
Incidentally, because the piece begins with a rest, the first tone came well after the performance began in 2001. For the first twenty months, listeners heard only the bellows working.
So, typical John Cage. Right?
Maintaining is part of the show
Comparisons of a four-and-a-half minute silent performance and a 639-year almost monotonal (and, yes, monotonous) performance are bound to be a stretch, but their effects bring the works together. Both 4'33" and ORGAN^2/ASLSP of Halberstadt’s John Cage Organ Project make us think beyond the tonal, harmonic, percussive, rhythmic elements of the experience (which may, after all, be “nonexistent” in the manner of 4'33").
In the case of the John Cage Organ Project, my mind wanders from the raw tones (Hamburg’s harbor/machine shop) to consider the ambition and infrastructure of the whole endeavor. The ambition is everywhere manifest, but I think the largest imprint of the project is a shaping of time and history. Because it follows a scale of centuries, a human role in the project changes. No longer are we listeners or performers, simply because the music outlasts our individual lives. We maintain and support, and these activities in a sense still serve a role of “performer.”
I told a former student about the John Cage Organ Project, since she had studied music and knew some of Cage’s work. The project reminded her of the Ship of Theseus thought experiment: “If the performance were to continue for 639 years and more organ parts are gradually replaced,” she wrote to me, “I wonder if there would be a certain point at which it becomes a completely different piece.” For those unfamiliar with the story, John Dryden’s translation of Plutarch’s Life of Theseus provides the gist:
The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.
No doubt, John Cage would have enjoyed the association with the question; it resonates with Zen, which he studied and from which he drew stories.
My student’s question whether the performance “becomes a completely different piece” might focus too closely on its musical tones, but she astutely focuses on the problem of keeping-things-going that “normal” musical performances infrequently contend with (broken cello or guitar strings notwithstanding). The replacing of parts, the adjustments, the planning all become matters of this performance in particular, and those activities make up a significant part of the “environment” that Cage’s works often seem to bring to our attention. The most theatrical events in the project are, of course, its infrequent chord changes, which are accomplished by moving pipes around or activating pipes that had been added. (See the Youtube video of the “Impulse #15” note change on September 5, 2020.)
Maintenance of the project turns into part of the score, so to speak, of an extraordinarily large and long work. In the plan of the project the tones alone survive. No human witnesses the beginning and the end of the performance. Like Theseus’ ship, parts of the organ will slip into history as well. Engaged to maintain, our individual efforts mount and add up, overlappingly across time, to lay the foundation for the music. No doubt, humans will clean up messes and anticipate and navigate interruptions as the centuries roll on.
Time and scale
Noah Brier recently looked at “The Media Timescale” in Why Is This Interesting (aka “WITI” and also a Substack newsletter). In it, he categorizes media by timescales, with streams and Twitter on the “fast” lane and books and documentaries on the “slow.” The timescale doesn’t imply value, since it’s a way of placing media into a frame or grouping types that all have value in their contexts. He writes that
having a great Twitter list was truly like being tapped into a hive brain. But analysis it’s not. And for that, I turn elsewhere. Over the years I’ve tried to focus my attention in this area more towards the slow stuff, even trying not to read too many new books that hadn’t yet had the time to settle.
Brier’s WITI post opens with an interesting discussion of “the fifty-year newspaper” that has a timescale of half a century and is issued once every fifty years. It’s a thought experiment that Oxford economist Max Roser proposed in The Washington Post in 2016. Fifty-year newspapers “likely wouldn’t report on half a century of gossip about celebrities and politicians. Instead, they’d focus on major global changes since the last edition.” Timescale shapes content and purpose.
The John Cage Organ Project frames our encounter with the music in somewhat the same way, bringing forth matters muffled in the everyday rush. The project is unconventional — we understand that much immediately — but how do we approach its centuries-spanning scale? If music calls forth depths of human experience, as many of us believe, what does the timescale of Halberstadt’s long-running performance call forth? Like other Cage pieces, the music points beyond itself to matters of its environment and other frames of reference. It’s no wonder that the first academic meeting on the John Cage Organ Project focused on time.
Donors can sponsor a year of the project (currently 1,000 Euros), which is acknowledged by a plaque with words they choose hung in the Burchardi Church. The plaque for the year 2312 simply states “ZUR ZEIT WIRD HIER DER RAUM,” a play on words from the libretto of Wagner’s Parsifal that transposes the words Raum and Zeit. It translates into the Zen-like utterance “At the moment, the space is” (thanks, Google) or, perhaps more fittingly, “Space becomes time here.”
A certain privileged presence comes with longevity or at least ambitions of long duration, as if the tones in Burchardi Church audaciously say, “In this place, that stood centuries before our music sounded, our tones remain. We hover over the world outside. We fill stone walls. We endure.” Perhaps that sentiment echoes Ozymandias a bit too much, but with maintenance and human ingenuity the tones can continue through catastrophes that time and chance deliver.
* * *
In “Experimental Music: Doctrine” published in The Score and I. M. A. Magazine (June 1955), Cage presents a dialogue between “an uncompromising teacher and an unenlightened student.” Its first part ends with this exchange:
QUESTION: I have noticed that you write durations that are beyond the possibility of performance.
ANSWER: Composing’s one thing, performing’s another, listening’s a third. What can they have to do with one another?
The John Cage Organ Project again poses his question in the “ANSWER” (itself a delightfully Cagean twist).
Tags: experimental music, Zen Buddhism, new music, slow movement, John Cage, Halberstadt, ASLSP, John-Cage-Orgelstiftung
Links, cited and not, some just interesting
Enter the rabbit hole: Stock, Ulrich. “John Cage: Abschied vom gis.” Die Zeit. February 4, 2022, sec. Kultur. https://www.zeit.de/kultur/musik/2022-02/john-cage-halberstadt-gis-musikstueck/komplettansicht.
Sheet music: Cage, John. “Organ^2/ASLSP.” Edition Peters (Issuu), June 1987. https://issuu.com/editionpeters/docs/www..editionpeters.com. Substack can’t handle superscripts, so I used a caret (“^”) to indicate the superscripted “2.” “ASLSP” stands for “as slow as possible.”
Great book on Cage’s 4'33": Gann, Kyle. No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4'33". Icons of America. New Haven [Conn.]: Yale University Press, 2010. Alibris has it, affordably.
The Mountain Goats, too? Darnielle, John. “There Are Other Forces at Work.” Harper’s Magazine, January 1, 2016. https://harpers.org/archive/2016/01/there-are-other-forces-at-work/.
Panorama of the Cage Organ rooms in the Burchardi Church in Halberstadt, Germany: John Cage Orgel Stiftung. “Panorama.” ASLSP.Org (blog). Accessed February 14, 2022. https://www.aslsp.org/eguide/panorama/. Includes audio clips and information on points of interest.
Recent chord change, February 5, 2022:
BBC on the beginning of the performance of ORGAN^2/ASLSP: Broomby, Rob. “World’s Longest Music Performance Starts.” BBC News, September 5, 2001. http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1525792.stm.
Huh. Maybe not really the longest: The New York Times. “The Eternal (or Almost) Resonance of Music,” May 6, 2006, sec. Opinion. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/06/opinion/the-eternal-or-almost-resonance-of-music-696447.html. In a letter to the editor, David Grubbs noted that 639 years is “but a blink of the eye” compared with Rodney Graham’s Parsifal. That composition goes from 1882 to 39,969,364,735 AD, though Grubbs notes that “this estimate as to the work’s length does not take into consideration the projected extinction of our solar system.”
Book by John Cage (“Experimental Music: Doctrine” is reprinted in it): Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1961. Worth paging through prose written somewhat like music. Also affordably available from Alibris.