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From The Times
January 6, 2006

Delayed impact

Life may be short, but here is art that will be a long time in coming
Writers have been known to be verbose. Some have made verbosity into an art. Bloggers, schoolchildren padding out an essay and Henry James drawing out his perceptions into paragraphs can do it. Some unromantic and impatient souls find Tristan and Isolde rather long. But even Wagner could not compete with the concert in Germany, the second chord of which was played yesterday. This performance began in 2001. The first year and a half consisted of silence. The first chord was played two years ago. Yesterday’s second chord will be played continuo for the next few years. The keys on the organ will be held down by weights, in order to allow the organist time off for concert breaks, and replacement by a long bench of substitutes. Organ voluntaries always seem to last longer than they actually do.

The piece is Organ2/ASLSP (as slow as possible) by John Cage, the maestro of aleatoric (dodgy, decided by chance) music and guru of Zen Buddhism. Organists, philosophers, theologians and musicologists spent years debating how slow is “as slow as possible”. Till the crack of doom is the orthodox Buddhist answer. But the sages decided on a performance to last 639 years, because the Blockwerk organ was constructed in 1361 (639 years before 2000). This was the first organ with a claviature of 12 notes. It is considered the cradle of modern music. The Buchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany, has been restored for the concert. The performance is the planting of “a musical apple tree”. Today’s opening chords sound more like a triad of six whistles. But you will have to wait until 2639 for the definitive review — as usual, in The Times.

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