The sound that is to be heard in Halberstadt might seem abnormal at first. Due to the stretched timeframe of the performance, the sound seems like a constant sound to the visitor. In the past years there have been discussions about the meaning of sound in Organ2/ASLSP. German composer Gerd Zacher did the first performance of the piece together with John Cage. This initial performance in 1987 took about half an hour and Zacher was, until his death last year, convinced that the performance in Halberstadt is an absolute misinterpretation of John Cage’s work (Ericsson 2015, Interview). Zacher says that the title of the work, written as ‘ASLSP’, is a direct reference to James Joyce’s Finnigan’s Wake. Christoph Bossert (2015, Interview) explains:
“In the story, Finnigan wakes up in the morning, he goes outside and looks at the town, the sleeping town, and he gives his greetings to the sleeping town. When he starts to speak, a sound gets out of his mouth: ‘Soft morning, city! Lsp!’. What Gerd Zacher says that these three letters, L, S, P, are a very genius way to explain how sound is created at the deepest point of your voice. ‘LLL’ is a sound from the deepest point of your voice, ‘SSS’ brings the sound in your mouth, at your tongue and then there is an explosion that brings the sound to your lips: ‘PPP’! LSP then is a sound that escapes quickly, you create it as fast as possible. If you know this, AS LSP can not only mean as slow as possible, but also as fast as possible.”
Zacher’s critique was that the Halberstadt project only followed the first meaning of the work and ignored the second. Bossert however says that this other meaning in fact is incorporated in the project as well, because each change of tones —“Klangwechsel”—has become an event, where hundreds of people gather to hear the changing sound as if the change is a performance in itself. This change, according to Bossert, embodies the other meaning Cage intended in ASLSP: at the moment of change the new pipe will be set at wind and then “woah, a new sound is coming”(2015, Interview). In a short moment of time, one sound slips away and the other comes in: the pipe of the organ then functions as a mouth that lets the sound slip out. The sound in the Halberstadt performance deals with the physical phenomenon of sound and silence: we are bound to think that music is about sound, but what John Cage stressed throughout his life was that music is just as much about silence, as it is about sound. The relations that take place —the small gasp of changing sound each Klangwechsel, the effect of the ringing drone of tones and what it means to place sound in time and space —are what we need to focus on.
References
- Bossert, C. (07-05-2015). Interview with the author.
- Ericsson, H.O. (27-04-2015). Interview with the author.
- You can find more about the project in Halberstadt here and here.
- Or perhaps you would be interested to read about sounds of the past?
