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Hey, do you guys want to hear an awesome new song?
Trust me, it’s like, reaallly good.
Ready?
Here we go…
What do you think?
That was just the beginning, here let me play you something from the middle, where it really
heats up….
Pretty awesome, right?
Now here’s the big finale…Aaand that’s the end.
Did you like it?
I should mention, by the way, that there’s nothing wrong with your speakers—I mean
maybe there is, I don’t know what your deal is—but if you didn’t hear anything just
then, don’t worry: you weren’t supposed to.
That’s because the song, entitled “4’33”, consists entirely of a musician or musicians
“resting” for four minutes and thirty three seconds.
It’s by the famed avant-garde composer John Cage, and on the one hand, you could argue
that it isn’t music at all, but on the other hand, it’s kind of the only famous song
we can use on HAI without infringing on copyright.
Either way, the point is, John Cage is a weird dude with way more weird songs that I don’t
even have time to get into—some of which involve toasters, blenders, bathtubs, Geiger
counters, and sometimes, rarely, when he wanted to really get crazy, even musical instruments.
This is all to say that when the Maryland Summer Institute for the Creative and Performing
Arts was having a piano competition in 1985 and they reached out to John Cage to compose
a new piece to serve as the contemporary requirement, knowing full well who John Cage was, they
got exactly what they had coming.
What was coming was the possibly brilliant, possibly insane, definitely weird ASLSP.
ASLSP is an abbreviation of As Slow as Possible, because that’s totally how abbreviations
work, and it’s a simple, fun, easy-to-listen-to piece of music—if by simple, fun, and easy-to-listen-to
you mean complicated, boring, and largely unpleasant.
Don’t take my word for it, take the word of Thomas Moore, the coordinator of the competition
that commissioned it, who said that the audience and jury, “begrudgingly put up with” the
piece, which coincidentally is what commenters say they do with most of these videos.
ASLSP consists of eight sections, which should be played in order, but the player is instructed
to choose one to skip and one to repeat, which they may do at any point regardless of order.
Make sense?
No?
Perfect.
Most importantly, though, ASLSP does not specify a tempo.
It simply says it is to be played “As Slow as Possible.”
Now, because of the limits of how long a piano can hold a note, the piece would traditionally
last anywhere from 20-70 minutes, which is a long time, but 70 minutes of boredom can
be handled—just ask the first third of The Irishman.
But in 1987, Cage released a version of the piece that adapted it for the organ, called
Organ2/ASLSP, which made things much, much worse—and not just because Organ2 sounds
like an evil organ transplant harvesting program from a dystopian sci-fi novel.
You see, unlike a piano, an organ can theoretically hold a note forever.
Pianos are percussion instruments, whose sound is produced by a hammer that hits a string,
causing it to vibrate, and eventually that vibration will stop.
Organs, on the other hand, produce sound by having air pushed through them, and so as
long as air is pushed through the pipes—which electric pipe organs can do indefinitely using
motors—a note can play forever.
What followed, then, is exactly what you would think would follow: a bunch of musicians started
playing the piece for increasingly ridiculous lengths of time like they were the David Blaine
of extreme organ playing.
However, in 1997, things were taken to a whole new level when a bunch of musicians and philosophers
at an organ conference—a thing that apparently exists—in Trossingen, Germany, started debating
what it really means for the piece to be played as slow as possible, because I mean… what
else are you going to talk about at an organ conference?
Kidneys?
After a while, they found themselves unsatisfied with theoretical answers, and so decided to
do what any reasonable person would do in that situation—set up a 639 year-long rendition
of the piece in a German church.
Because, you know, culture, or something.
If you managed to do the math that 1997 was less than 639 years ago, you’ll have realized
that that performance is still going on—and indeed it is, in St Burchardi church in Halberstadt,
Germany.
A special organ was built for the occasion—which is operated by sandbags that keep the keys
pressed and has a limited number of pipes that can be switched out to achieve whatever
notes are currently necessary—and it began playing ASLSP on September 5, 2001.
Well, sort of, because ASLSP actually begins with a pause, so it was nearly two years until
the first chord was played, on February 5, 2003, a day when a few hundred people gathered
in St Burchardi church to experience the absolutely thrilling, totally worth-the-two-year-wait
feeling of hearing a single chord being played on an small-ish organ.
I don't know music stuff but according to my audio editor Graham, the chord was an E
Major split over two beats, consisting of a G sharp above middle C, the B above G sharp,
and the G sharp an octave above first G sharp.
I have no idea what that means, so if it's wrong it's Graham's fault and if it's right
I think I should get credit for having the good judgment to trust Graham, who should
be playing you that note… now.
To keep the precise temporal proportions of the piece, the time between note changes varies
widely, from as few as 92 days to as many as 2,527 days, or nearly seven years.
That longest wait is actually happening right now, and will end on September 5, 2020, which
is two days from when this is being posted—timing that I 100% totally planned and didn’t just
find out after I started writing.
The performance is scheduled to end in 2640, or 639 years after it began—the same amount
of time between when the performance was scheduled to start in 2000, and when the first organ
was installed in Halberstadt cathedral in 1361.
At least, that’s unless the world is destroyed before then, but why would something like
that ever happen?
If want to learn more about musical genius and certified mad-lad John Cage, you should
check out Kay Larson’s very good biography of him, Where the Heart Beats, which is available
right now as an audiobook on Audible.
By the way, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the whole world is kind of insane right
now—and that’s why Audible is helping out by offering free access to hundreds of
great titles totally free, at stories.audible.com, no strings attached, no signup, no ads.
If you do sign up for an Audible membership, though, you’ll get a lot of great stuff:
one audiobook credit a month, plus total access to audible originals, plus stuff like guided
meditations and daily news digests.
You could do what I did recently and listen to the audiobook, The Boys in the Boat, the
fantastic non-fiction book about the 1936 American men’s rowing team, to help make
up for the fact that the Olympics didn’t just happen.
You can get 30 days free, and get that free audiobook, by going to audible.com/HAI, or
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