The American avant-garde composer John Cage is probably most notable for his 1952 composition titled 4'33", shown in the video above. It is a piece that was deliberately devoid of sound, trying to challenge what we traditionally believe about musicianship and musical experience.
Now just before he died in 1992, Cage left some instructions regarding one of his other pieces titled Organ2/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible), which was basically to play the piece as slowly as possible. What that meant exactly, may be quite hard to determine. How slow should it be, or for how long should a single note be played?
Several music scholars, art professors, and theologians who comprised the John Cage Organ Foundation in Halberstadt, Germany tried to figure out how to execute such eclectic instructions, so after much deliberation, they settled on the piece being played for 639 years, by using sandbags to weigh down the keys.
The rationale behind this decision was based on the time between the construction of the world's first 12-tone Gothic organ in Halberstadt, in 1361, and the year 2000. The performance had started on September 5, 2001, which would have been Cage's 89th birthday.
Of course, trying to plan out a performance spanning multiple centuries is quite difficult, and Rainer Neugebauer, a member of the foundation, attested to that fact, citing the thousands of mistakes that have happened just in the first years of the performance.
They had realized that the first part of the piece was supposed to be played for 28 months, instead of the original 17 months. Or when a crew had knocked over one of the pipes of the organ while they were filming, which changed the note being played. There was also the time when they had to delay the chord-change ceremony for a couple of weeks because a politician who was supposed to attend could not.
The piece is scheduled to end in the year 2640, and the first of the piece's eight movements is scheduled to finish on September 4, 2072.
(Video credit: Joel Hochberg/Youtube)