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John Cage recital set to last 639 years recently witnessed a chord change

John Cage recital set to last 639 years recently witnessed a chord change

pseudolus

Comments (220)

  • _petronius
    Some art-haters in the comments, so to defend this piece of contemporary art for a moment: one thing I love about it is a commitment to the long future of art, creativity, and civilization. What does it take to keep an instrument playing for six hundred years? To commit to that idea -- like the century-long projects of cathedral building in the middle ages, or the idea of planting trees you won't live to see mature -- is (to me) the awesome thing about the Halberstadt performance. All rendered in a medium (church organ) that has existed for an even longer time.It's a pretty hopeful, optimistic view of the future in a time of high uncertainty, but also represents a positive argument: it's worth doing these things because they are interesting, weird, and fun, and because they represent a continuity with past and future people we will never meet.Plus, you can already buy a ticket to the finale, so your distant descendants can go see it :)
  • labrador
    639 years? Big deal, The Long Now foundation built a clock to last 10,000 years. I hate John Cage since I got his massive world-wide hit 4′33″ stuck in my head.
  • salynchnew
    I am so happy that this is in my HN feed today.I wish there was more stuff like this, both in my feed and in the world.
  • gweinberg
    It doesn't make sense to me that the piece should start with a 17 month rest. Surely it doesn't really start until the first note is played?
  • watersb
    Remember where you were when the eighth drop of pitch fell in Queensland?Man, that was wild.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment
  • gred
    This makes me think of the Hari Seldon recordings which play over the course of centuries in the "Foundation" books by Isaac Asimov.
  • comrade1234
    Someone must have played it sped up? Is the music public?
  • LorenDB
  • throw310822
    Oddly enough, Bach's BWV 639 is one of my favourite (organ) pieces. But it appears to be just a coincidence, since the length was decided as the number of years since the construction of the first organ in Halberstadt to the new millennium.
  • soupfordummies
    Ah dammit, just take it once again from the top
  • seydor
    avant garde is so 20th century
  • NelsonMinar
    Here's a video (with sound) of one of the other chord changes. It didn't occur to me they'd just swap in a pipe instead of pressing a key on a keyboard.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3BBgQPuPI0
  • andyjohnson0
    Related:Longplayer: a one-thousand year long compositionhttps://longplayer.org/
  • cess11
    Less known than 4'33" being "silent" (which it's not) is that John Cage was an anarchist."Both Fuller and Marshall McLuhan knew, furthermore, that work is now obsolete. We have invented machines to do it for us. Now that we have no need to do anything what shall we do? Looking at Fuller's Geodesic World Map we see that the earth is a single island. Oahu. We must give all the people all they need to live in any way they wish. Our present laws protect the rich from the poor. If there are to be laws we need ones that begin with the acceptance of poverty as a way of life. We must make the earth safe for poverty without dependence on government."https://monoskop.org/images/9/9c/Cage_John_Anarchy_New_York_... (PDF)A shorter read here:https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/09/15/john-cage-silence-...
  • neuroelectron
    How about that
  • moon2
    Finally some good news.
  • stavros
    > In theory, a pipe organ can sound indefinitely, so long as it receives adequate power and its pedals are pressed continually. [..] Thus, the only threats to this performance are the survival of the organ, the will of the unborn and the erratic tides of arts funding.And, you know, power outages.
  • encom
  • bell-cot
  • jfengel
    This is the same guy who wrote 4'33", the silent piece.I kinda get that -- the 40000 Hz podcast gave it some good context:https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/433-by-john-cage-twent...Maybe they'll also explain the point of this. The piece is called "As Slow As Possible", but it's not as slow as possible. The slowest possible piece would have a fermata with an infinity sign over the first note, and that's it. Maybe the rest of it would be a jaunty little tune that would never be played in context. ("Shave and a haircut", perhaps?)As a stunt, it's moderately interesting. How do you set up a contraption to play for hundreds of years? How do you maintain it without interrupting the performance? But it's less interesting than the 10,000 year clock.
  • curtisszmania
    [dead]
  • kleiba
    [flagged]
  • uwagar
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  • wtcactus
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  • renewiltord
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  • zombot
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  • fullshark
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  • johnea
    So, an organ changed to a new chord, and I'm supposed to pay to _read_ about it?I find the subject mildly interesting, but the paywalled internet is just another sign of end stage capitalism...