Almost two years ago, in August 2013, I found myself in the German town of Halberstadt approaching a small building: the Buchardi church. Since 2001, this little church sets the scene for an extraordinary performance of John Cage’s Organ2/ASLSP. As soon as I entered the space, I got lost in the sound of a small organ —a haunting drone of tones, that I found to be peculiar, yet anything but unpleasant. If you would stumble upon the church and not read any of its signs, you would most probably have no idea that what you just encountered is in fact a performance, a 639 year performance.
The piece that is being performed in Halberstadt was written by the American composer John Cage. In 1985, he wrote the first version of it, called ASLSP, for piano. ASLSP stands for As SLow aS Possible and consists of eight parts, one of which should be omitted in performance and at least one other repeated, according to the directions. Although the order of the parts should be kept the same, the repetition may be freely placed and dynamics and tempo are free as well, leaving a lot of room for interpretation. This openness in interpretation is something familiar in John Cage’s body of work.
Two years after writing the piano version of ASLSP, the piece was rewritten for organ, in 1987. It is this composition, called Organ2/ASLSP, that is currently being performed in Halberstadt. The direction ‘as slow as possible’ did not pose too many problems when performing the piano version, because all the tones played on that instrument die fairly soon. However, when performed on organ, the tempo of the performance is no longer directly defined by the capabilities of the instrument, because the tone in the organ will not die by itself. On the contrary: it will be stable as long as you want it to be, which brings other influences to the fore (Bossert 2015, Interview). Even though the first performance by German composer Gerard Zacher only took about half an hour, Organ2/ASLSP invites people to reconsider the parameters of musical performance. The boundaries of performing a musical piece, like the role of the performer(s) and music’s material settings, come into sight and have to be questioned in order to formulate any possible answer to John Cage’s open direction ‘as slow as possible’.
The performance of Organ2/ASLSP that currently takes place in Halberstadt, however, only started in 2001, even though the seeds for it were planted years earlier. In the late 1990s, several scholars and musicians met frequently and travelled to visit several organs all over Europe. The aspect of ‘duration’ became a point of discussion as they listened to Johan Ulrich Steigleder’s Vater unser im Himmelreich (1627) (circa 90 minutes), composer Christoph Bossert played Klavierstück I (circa 40 minutes) and several pieces of Messiaen, Bach, and Schönberg of irregular lengths were played too. In one of these meetings, music theorist Heinz Klaus Metzger talked about Organ2/ASLSP and suggested that the piece could take a hundred years or even hundreds of years. Afterwards, some parts of Cage’s piano version ASLSP were played, and a whole version of Organ2/ASLSP was performed by Hans Peter Schulz. After this performance, a discussion about the question what ‘as slow as possible’ could mean, formed a climax to all the experiences of the days before. The attendees got wind up in a discussion and composer Hans-Ola Ericsson describes:
“Many ideas came to the table then: Could a performance take a day? Could a performance be as long as you can be awake, like a Guiness Book of Records thing? Or could it be the lifetime of a person, either short or long, maybe seventy or eighty years? Then I suggested that it could be the lifetime of an instrument, and when I suggested this it was a sort of ‘aha-experience’ that the piece could actually go on for the lifetime of an organ instrument. That being said, we decided that we wanted to meet again to discuss this further” (2015, Interview)
The years after this initial discussion, a group of musicians, musicologists and theorists kept discussing the idea further, searching for options to actually realize the performance they had in mind. When composer Jakob Ullman proposed Halberstadt as an option for the performance to take place, this instantly made sense to most people involved (Ericsson 2015, Interview). Namely, Halberstadt was the home town of the famous 1361 Blockwerk organ by Nicholas Faber. This organ, constructed in the town’s cathedral, is described by Praetorius as ‘revolutionary for its time’ as it was the first organ with a keyboard of 12 tones. The instrument marked a new phase in music and ringed in a new era for the organ as important actor in church music (Partch 1974, pp. 373-374). The group decided to take this revolutionary organ as a direct starting point for the new performance of Organ2/ASLSP: in 1361 the Faber organ was built and in the year 2000 — 639 years later — the performance of Organ2/ASLSP would start, mirroring the same period of time into the future (Gastell 2015, Interview).
References
- Bossert, C. (07-05-2015). Interview with the author.
- Ericsson, H.O. (27-04-2015). Interview with the author.
- Gastell, K. (20-04-2015). Interview with the author.
- Partch, H. (1974). Genesis of a Music. New York: Da Capo Press.
