"First notes for 639-year composition"

[Kim Cascone <kim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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The first notes in the longest and slowest piece of music in history,
designed to go on for 639 years, were played at 1800 local time (1700
GMT) on a German church organ on Wednesday, February 5, 2003.  The three
notes, which will last for a year-and-a-half, are just the start of the
piece, called "As Slow As Possible".  Composed by late avant-garde
composer John Cage, the performance has already been going for 17 months
- although all that has been heard so far is the sound of the organ's
bellows being inflated.  The music will be played in Halberstadt, a
small town renowned for its ancient organs in central Germany.

It was originally a 20-minute piece for piano, but a group of musicians
and philosophers decided to take the title literally and work out how
long the longest possible piece of music could last.  They settled on
639 years because the Halberstadt organ was 639 years old in the year
2000.  "We started discussing: what is as slow as possible for the
organ?", Swedish composer and organist Hans-Ola Ericsson told BBC Radio
4's Today programme.

"We, a group of theologians, musicologists, philosophers, composers and
organists, met during a couple of years solely to discuss this
question.  It was rather wonderful to have one topic to discuss at
length.  We came up with the answer that the piece could last for the
duration of the organ - that is the lifetime of an organ."

Cage composed the original piece before his death in 1992, and Mr.
Ericsson said Cage would have liked what they had done with it.  "It's a
sound that we give to the future to take care of, and hopefully the
aesthetics and the ideas of John Cage will manage to survive."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2728595.stm 

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