Coping with Cage: On Organ2/ASLSP, Listening, and Music-Making

During the evening session of the ASAP symposium in Amsterdam on May 25, 2018, I played the first line of John Cage's composition ORGAN²/ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible) on the little organ in the Kerkzaal, a room on the top floor of the University's main building, which was originally built to serve as a church hall. My companion was sound artist Mirjam Meerholz, who contributed a soundscape produced by a seven-part loudspeaker system, distributed across the hall and on the adjoining roof terrace. It made us think. How to cope with Cage in the context of a conference?

MARYLAND

In 1985, John Cage composed ASLSP for a piano competition at the University of Maryland. The piece has eight parts, one of which the pianist should choose to omit, and another one to repeat. One could imagine the pianist making a tone appear only when the former one has faded away completely, as that would make the music sound "as slow as possible." One could even expect such an approach to be to Cage's liking, as he himself "translated" ASLSP into "as slow as possible," but he actually gave no clues as to how it should be played; in fact, his instructions include the remark that "neither tempo nor dynamics have been indicated." To Thomas Moore, who premiered the piece and wanted to know how long the performance preferably would take, Cage responded, rather Zen-like: "If each section took one minute to play, then the piece would last eight minutes."¹ In 1987, following a suggestion by German organist Gerd Zacher, Cage made the organ version, ORGAN²/ASLSP. Zacher premiered the piece the same year in Metz, France. It took him about twenty-nine minutes to play it.

HALBERSTADT

On September 5, 2001, a very special performance of ORGAN²/ASLSP started in the St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany: it is planned to last until at least the year 2640.² Actually, the performance is the only function of the church. Gutted completely, having been abandoned for decades, it appears to be the perfect place for the likewise unpretentious yet significant music.

The plan to have ORGAN²/ASLSP sound for centuries was born in 1998 in Trossingen, Germany. Following the First International Week of New Organ Music that had taken place a year earlier in the same town, organists including Christoph Bossert, Hans-Ola Ericsson, and Karin Gastell came together with organ builders including Gerald Woehl to think about time in music. Obviously, they were inspired by the piece's title. They were aware that its performance might not need to be longer than it would take to say "lsp," as Cage had related ASLSP to that word in the final chapter of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake: "Soft morning, city! Lsp!"³ Yet taking the endlessness of organ tones instead to determine how slow "as slow as possible" could be fascinated them more. In principle, this idea is untenable: playing as slow as possible on an organ would mean that the music would never get beyond the first tones, as they would only die when the wind flow to the pipes producing them stopped—which it won't, provided the organ is maintained well. Hence, the Trossingen group envisioned Cage's music sounding so slowly that experiencing it would evoke a sensation of endlessness.

A decisive practical step was taken by identifying Halberstadt as the birthplace of modern music: the little town once housed in its cathedral the first large organ equipped with keyboards providing twelve tones per octave.⁴ The fact that the organ was built in 1361 inspired the Trossingen group to a literally far-reaching idea: the time between 1361 and 2000 spans 639 years, so what if the performance would start in 2000 and last until 2639?

Once again, and as always, Cage inspired keeping opposite options open; just like he mentions in his preliminary note to his famous piece 4′33″ regarding the length of its performance ("the work may … last any length of time"), ORGAN²/ASLSP...