On Slowness

In 1987, John Cage wrote a piece for organ called "As Slow as Possible." The idea is that the performer should take the title literally--that while the relationships between the notes should never change, only the performer's notion of what "slow" means would determine the final length of the piece. (In other words, a whole note is still a whole note, an eighth note still an eighth note--but how long they last is up to the artist.) Performances generally run from 20 to 70 minutes--but on February 5th, Diane Luchese gave a performance at Towson University that ran for just under 15 hours.

I love what the Baltimore Sun's music critic, Tim Johnson, had to say about this particular form of musical insanity. He "stopped by" in the tenth hour of the performance, noting that there were only a dozen audience members when he arrived, and four by the time he left. But he went on to say this:

Sustained low notes on the organ's pedals created a visceral, fundamental rumble that suggested the drone of some cosmic machinery. Dissonant chords appeared and disappeared unpredictably above that pulsating foundation--chance encounters with sonority. Almost each change in notes or tone colors seemed positively cataclysmic in this glacial context.

I've written about "deep time" before, and it seems to me this Cage piece is the musical equivalent of it. Something that shifts your perspective right round, taking you out of the go-go now and drops you into something larger and stranger and richer.

Slowness is anathema to we modern-folk, but it has much to be said for it. Just today I had to drive during a pretty horrible rainstorm, and I fast became a fan of slowness. (It had something to do with not dying.) But I find the virtues of slowness in more and more places, lately: I have become a slow reader, so that it takes months to get through a book sometimes, but your experience of a book is definitely different when you linger, and let the words work on you; and exercise is most definitely a more valuable experience when done slowly. (There's a chain of fitness clubs in L.A. called SuperSlow that operates on exactly this principle. Try it, try any exercise you do regularly, and do it at half-speed. You'll notice the difference in a big way.)

But Ms. Luchese's fifteen-hour marathon of "As Slow as Possible" is nothing compared to the one going on, right now, at the St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany.

The total length of this performance of Mr. Cage's composition? Six hundred thirty-nine years.

There is a very entertaining reason for why this specific span of time was chosen, and you can read about it on the page linked above. But suffice it to say that at the church, right this very moment, a single chord is being played, on and on, and it won't change at all until July 5, 2010. And it seems to me that, aside from this endeavor being sheerest insanity, it is also madly inspiring: it takes a certain resolute optimism to believe that such a thing is even possible. It makes me want to save the world, just so that organ can continue playing for the next 600-plus years.

It occurred to me, when I first heard this story, that it would make for a fascinating documentary. So I was a little disappointed to discover recently that someone named Scott Smith has already made one. But as I was looking at his website, I clicked for a page and got the following result, which so delighted me that, without further comment, I now present it for you. Go ahead, click on it, it's worth it, I promise.