A performance of a John Cage organ piece began in 2001 and will end in 2640.
Cage's score says only to play 'as slow as possible'. In a German church in Halberstadt, a specially built organ is taking that literally: a 639-year performance, with sandbags holding down the keys and a chord change every few years. The opening rest alone lasted 17 months.
Cage wrote ASLSP for piano in 1985 and adapted it for organ in 1987 as Organ²/ASLSP. The title is an instruction, and he left the tempo open so that no two performances would be alike. A piano performance usually lasts between 20 and 70 minutes. But a pipe organ, unlike a piano, can hold a note for as long as it has air. At a conference in 1997, musicians and philosophers discussed just how slow 'as slow as possible' could be.
The answer in Halberstadt was 639 years. The number marks the span between the first documented permanent organ in the town's cathedral, around 1361, and the planned start date of 2000. Money was short, so the start slipped a year. An organ was built specially for the piece in the town's St. Burchardi church, and the performance began on 5 September 2001 with a rest that lasted until February 2003, when the first pipes sounded.
Sandbags weigh down the pedals, bellows keep air flowing, and pipes are added or removed at each change. Every change falls on the fifth of a month. The chord changed in July 2008, in 2012 and many times since; the most recent came in August 2026, and the next is due in October 2027. In 2011 the organ was encased in acrylic glass to lower the volume. Until 2021, the foundation funded the project by selling commemorative plaques for each year up to 2640.
It is the second-longest musical performance ever attempted, after the computer-generated Longplayer, and the longest non-computerised one. Human players have tested the limits too: a team of four organists once played it around the clock in six-hour shifts for eight days, 192 hours in total, at the ASU Organ Hall. Like 4′33″, the piece asks what music is. Here the answer includes patience across generations.
Source: Wikipedia — As Slow as Possible · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
