Longest-lasting piece of music ever says goodbye to lonely ‘guess’

On Saturday, Germany said goodbye to one of the saddest notes in music history. At 3 p.m. in the St. Burchardi Church in Halberstadt, the seven-tone from ‘c-des-gis-dis-e-ais-e’ changed into the six-tone “c-des-dis-e-ais-e”. The ‘guess’ was thrown out after serving sixteen months in the play ORGAN2/ASLSP (As SLow as Possible) by American composer John Cage.

Since 2000, Halberstadt has made a good effort to actually perform the piece as slowly as possible: they took 639 years to perform it. In the year 2640 – if all goes well and the world does not end – the last notes will sound. Every few years a sound change takes place, because because of the duration a tone sometimes lasts a few months, but soon a few years.

The seven tones together sound a bit sinister on Friday, but also impressive in a beautiful old monastery church. Standing behind some ropes in front of the organ I ask the ‘guess’ how he is doing. What I understand is that it has been a lonely time since he and the ‘e’ were added to the accord on September 5, 2020.

The other five notes had been heard together since October 5, 2013. They had been together for seven years when, in the midst of the pandemic, the ‘gis’ and the ‘e’ were added to the piece. The ‘guess’ must now be the only one to clear the field. The seven will continue as six and in exactly two years there will be another sound change.

Intellectual Bullying

How is it possible that a composer – who is best known for his piece 4’33”, in which a pianist does not press a key, and which is divided into three parts – composes such a long piece? And why did the instruction ‘as slowly as possible’ yield a time span of 639 years?

It went something like this: When the late Dadaist John Cage was asked in the 1980s to compose a piece of about five to ten minutes for a piano competition, he came up with ASLSP. The piece started with a long rest and the pianist was instructed to perform everything as slowly as possible, but – because of the competition – within ten minutes. A higher form of intellectual bullying.

Two years later, the German organist Gerd Zacher asked Cage if he had a new organ piece for him. Cage – rather lazy than tired – edited the piece in 1987 ASLSP for organ. The challenge now became another: where a piano tone dies when the string’s vibration stops, in an organ it can be sustained as long as air is pumped through those organ pipes.

So as slowly as possible could mean: as long as the organist feels like it, until the organist’s mother calls out that it is bedtime or to continue until the organist is dead. But she didn’t go far enough in Halberstadt. Sandbags were placed on an organ that ensure that the air supply is guaranteed and that a note can last forever.

Eternal is usually boring, so it was decided that the John-Cage-Orgel-Kunst-Projekt project in Halberstadt should be given a time limit. A music society got together at an organ conference in 1998, started calculating and came up with the location. Halberstadt: Cage (already dead) had never been there, perhaps never even heard of the place, but in the fourteenth century Halberstadt was home to the world’s first great twelve-tone organ. It is believed that this so-called Fabel organ was completed and playable in 1361.

The time between 1361 and 2000, when the Cage project in Halberstadt was being prepared, is 639 years. Voilà, there you have an eternity of 639 years. Based on that data, it was of course necessary to calculate how long all the notes would last. That has happened and until 2072 it is all indicated on the site (in 2072 the first part will be finished): some notes last half a year, others seven years. On John Cage’s birthday, September 5, 2001, the performance began. So that started with that rest, so that only the bellows could be heard, until after a year and a half on February 5, 2003 a triad sounded that could be heard for more than a year. And so it went with sound changes, Saturday was the fifteenth.

tear tea

Back to the ‘guess’ which is replaced after 16 months as the only note, while the other six get to stay. What was that like for those ‘guess’, playing in a time of a pandemic and therefore few audiences?

There is a story by Arnold Lobel about an owl who is going to make tea of ​​tears. To fill the pot with tea of ​​tears, he looks for sad things: “Chairs with broken legs. Songs that no one can sing because no one remembers the words. A beautiful sunrise, which no one sees, because everyone was asleep. And pencils that have become too small to hold.” There are many more sorrows, eventually Owl has a pot of tea and concludes: “It does taste a bit salty, but tear tea is always delicious.”

In 2022, too, a delighted feeling about the sound change prevails: “I am really very curious,” says Rainer Neugebauer, who is leading the Cage project, to the press present. Shortly before that, the mayor of Halberstadt presented him with a culture prize from the municipality, expressing thanks for the significance of this project. “Once that ‘guess’ is gone, I think it will sound a bit calmer,” Neugebauer expects.

When the pentagons were ‘set up’ in 2013, some 1,500 visitors came: admirers of Cage, anarchists, avant-gardists, press and lovers of eternal art. In fact, five years earlier, so many people had come to watch that many were not even allowed to enter and had to wait in front of the door until the switch was ready to hear the new sound.

That was different in 2020: when the ‘gis’ and the ‘e’ were allowed in, there was corona. Only a limited number of people could enter. All that time, the sound didn’t have to mind a foreign visit because of corona, and on February 5, 2022, the ‘guess’ will also be removed with little fanfare: corona measures still make it impossible to have a full house in the monastery church.

When the shiny organ pipe is removed with white gloves by a music scientist, there is applause and a bravo. However, it turns out that the enthusiasm is there for taking out the ‘gis’, and not for the ‘gis’ itself. The ‘gis’ lies flat behind the organ while clapping. And the saddest thing for the ‘guess’: the difference is not even really audible. The tea of ​​tears is thus complete: “Nuts that sound lonely and when they die are missed by no one.”