In eastern Germany, a modest organ is carrying one of the most unusual performances in modern music: the world’s slowest concert. For nearly 25 years, it has been sounding its way through a work by composer John Cage at an almost unimaginable pace.
The latest milestone came Wednesday with a rare chord change, as the music shifted from seven notes to eight after an A4 pipe was added. The moment marked roughly 4% completion of the 639-year John Cage Organ Project in Halberstadt.
Although the project officially started in 2000, the performance itself began on Sept. 5, 2001 — what would have been Cage’s 89th birthday. It opened with silence, a pause that continued until Feb. 5, 2003, when the first audible chords finally filled the medieval Burchardi Church in Halberstadt, Germany.
The piece, titled “ORGAN²/ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible),” is not expected to reach its final note until Sept. 4, 2640.
To keep the sound going, an electrically powered blower pushes air through the organ. Each chord change is performed by hand and alters the sustained sound, either by adding new tones or allowing existing ones to end.
On Tuesday, Jeffrey Lependorf, executive director of the John Cage Trust in New York, said he was eager to hear how the organ’s resonance would differ before and after Wednesday’s change.
“You feel it through your whole body,” he told The Associated Press. “It resonates in this incredible way.”
Cage, the American avant-garde composer, was born in Los Angeles in 1912 and died in New York in 1992. Also celebrated as a music theorist, artist and philosopher, he left only one guiding instruction for this work: play it as slowly and as softly as possible.
The interpretation of the composition in Halberstadt has resulted in the smallest unit being one month long. Other units — as well as silences — can last years.
MORE STORY: Emma Grede Children: Meet Grey, Lola, Lake And Rafferty
The project has transformed the Burchardi Church, which was left largely in ruins before money was raised for a new roof and other fixes to make the piece a reality.
The sound there envelopes visitors throughout the church and gives them new experiences to hear as they move through the empty space.
“I think it really is the organ playing the church and not the other way around,” Lependorf said. “You move two inches in any direction and it sounds not subtly different — very different.”
The piece will last 639 years, from 2001 to 2640. The time frame was chosen to be a tribute to a historic organ in Halberstadt that dates back to 1361, or 639 years before the project was initiated in 2000, according to Anneli Borgmann, chairwoman of the John Cage Organ Project Halberstadt’s board of trustees.
The time frame allows the project’s stewards and visitors to contemplate not only Cage’s legacy but their own as guardians of the organ and its sounds.
They also wonder what the world will look like by the end of the piece — will the church still be standing? Will the city of Halberstadt, which has already lived through two world wars, survive climate change?
The organ, at least, is built to last.
Organ builder Johannes Hüfken said the pipes he’s crafted for this will last at least another 500 years.
“This John Cage project is a good example of thinking ahead for the next generation — thinking outside the box, beyond the completely normal and traditional,” he said.
Wednesday’s event marked the piece’s 17th chord change. The next is set for Oct. 5, 2027, when the overall sound will be reduced by releasing the E4 pipe.
Inheritable “final tickets” for the Sept. 4, 2640 event are already being sold for 2,640 euros ($3,045).
