As Slow As Possible

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What is music? 

Can speech be music? How about silence? What about a single note? Not a melody; but a single note played for years. Is this music?

These are the questions that permeate John Cage's compositions; specifically, Organ, As Slow As Possible (ASLSP). Played in the St Burchardi Church in Halberstadt Germany, Organ ASLSP will take 639 years to play. And it’s not because there’s so much going on, that it takes time and effort to realise it all. It’s because everything – every note, every key shift, every pause, takes years to play. YEARS! 

The last time a note change occurred was in 2022. The time before that was in 2020. And the time before that was in 2013. When the next note is played, it isn’t just played for a brief count, and everyone moves on; the note keeps playing. Playing for every second, of every minute of every day, of every month, of every year until the next note is played. Right now, the note is a somewhat uplifting G♯3. In 9 months' time, D4 will be played.

The duration of Organ ASLSP was deliberate on the part of the Church. They wanted to live up to directions contained within the composition name; as slowly as possible. In 1998, as the Church planned the implementation of this piece, they gathered organists, musicians and theologians to discuss what it meant to play something "as slow as possible" within the limitations of the medium. Things such as the health of the instruments. When have you truly exhausted the dimensions of 'slowness'? When the instrument has broken down and can no longer play the music? Or when the world has ended? Perhaps it is somewhere in between. Where technicality and absurdity meet to create something uniquely human. 

Nevertheless, I return to the question I posed at the beginning of this piece. 

What is music? 

Is music about its' structure? or is it about intention? The attempt to convey the ineffable through a combination of sounds? Or the attempt to create euphony, out of cacophony? Is music just another extension of humanity's desire for order and love of pattern recognition? If so, do pieces like 4'33" or Organ, ASLSP challenge these desires, or do they give full meaning to them? Freeing us up to envision and embrace the music everywhere?

I wonder where I'll find music next...

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