As It Happens6:41Organ performing 639-year-long piece just changed chords for 1st time in years
About 500 people gathered inside an 11th-century church in Halberstadt, Germany, on Monday to listen to an organ switch from one chord to another.
The instrument — a makeshift device that uses sandbags to hold down the keys — is 23 years into a 639-year-long performance of a composition by the late avant garde musician John Cage.
Monday marked its first chord change in two years.
“It was a magic moment,” Rainer Neugebauer told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.
As slow as possible
Neugebauer is the head of the John Cage Organ Foundation, the volunteer group of Cage enthusiasts behind the centuries-long stunt.
The project, he says, dates back to a brainstorming session in 1998, six years after Cage’s death.
Music scholars, art professors and theologians came together, he said, to discuss the best way to perform Cage’s 1987 composition, Organ2/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible), which, as the title suggests, is meant to be played as slowly as possible.
Some said that any performance would have to encompass food and bathroom breaks for the organist, Neugebauer said, while others insisted that would go against the spirit of Cage’s intentions.
“There was a theologian, a man said, ‘Oh no, the organ organist must [keep] playing until he falls dead from his seat,'” Neugebauer said.
In the end, they decided to avoid the problem by arranging an organist-free performance.
17 months of silence
To make it happen, they constructed an organ in the Burchardi Church with metal pipes that can be added or taken away with each chord change, and electric-powered bellows, with a backup generator in case of emergencies.
The performance began on Sept. 5, 2001, which would have been Cage’s 89th birthday, with a goal of continuing for 639 years, “to mark the time between the construction of the world’s first 12-tone Gothic organ in Halberstadt, in 1361 CE, and the new millennium,” according to NPR.
As It Happens0:05Organ changes chord part-way through 639-year performance
But for the first 17 months, there were no notes at all — just the sound of air whooshing through the bellows. That’s because Cage’s piece begins with a short pause, which was stretched out accordingly for a centuries-long performance.
The first actual note rang out in 2003.
Liberating sound from meaning
Cage was an American composer and musical theorist known for his radical experiments with music and sound. One of his most famous pieces, 4′33″, literally instructs the musicians not to play their instruments at all.
He first composed ASLSP in 1985 for piano, before adapting it two years later for organ.
“He’s trying to teach us, I think, two things. On the one hand … that we hear anew the sound with open eyes and empty minds. And the second is he wants to free sounds — free sounds from interpretation, from meaning, from intention, from hierarchies,” Neugebauer said.
“This idea, it was influenced by Zen Buddhism. Every sound had its own value, every sound has its own centre. So don’t ask, ‘What does it mean?’ It means nothing. It’s only sound and you can enjoy it.”
In 2009, Diane Luchese performed ASLSP in just under 15 hours at Towson University in Maryland. In 2022, Christopher Anderson did it in 16 hours at Southern Methodist University in Texas. Last year, organist Alexander Meszler performed it over the course of 24 hours in Sundt Organ Studio at Luther College in Iowa.
But the John Cage Organ Foundation’s rendition is by far the most ambitious attempt to honour the spirit of Cage’s composition.
Can they make it to 2640?
On Monday, volunteers added a new pipe to the organ, producing a chord change that Neugebauer described as “a little bit fuller” and “a little bit warmer” than the note that preceded it.
This chord will continue until Aug. 5, 2026, but the song won’t be complete until 2640 — if all goes according to plan.
“There are many things in the world [that] make me not sure that it will be going until 2640,” Neugebauer, citing climate change, war and a rise in right-wing extremism.
But when he’s feeling optimistic, Neugebauer can imagine a future where the song goes even longer than planned.
“Maybe [people in the future will] say, ‘Oh, that’s not as slow as possible. We can do it a little bit slower.'”