The concert that will outlive us all

4 min read

There are concerts that last an evening, performances that stretch over several days, and then there is the one taking place inside the former St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany.
Well, It began on September 5, 2001, and is scheduled to end on September 5, 2640. By then, nobody alive today will be around to hear the final note!

The work is John Cage’s ORGAN²/ASLSP, an organ adaptation of his 1985 composition ASLSP, whose title is an abbreviation of the instruction written on the score: “As Slow As Possible.”
He later adapted the piece for organ in 1987, but he never specified exactly how slow “as slow as possible” should be. That omission became the starting point for one of the most extraordinary experiments in the history of music.

In 1997, a group of musicians and philosophers began asking the seemingly absurd question: if the piece is supposed to be played as slowly as possible, how slow can it actually go? Their answer was equally radical: as long as an organ can last — effectively turning the performance into something measured not in minutes or hours, but in centuries.
The number 639 was not chosen at random. In 1361, an organ with a keyboard layout considered an important milestone in the history of the modern organ was installed in Halberstadt Cathedral.
The project took the 639 years between 1361 and the turn of the millennium and projected that same span into the future. The original plan was therefore to create a performance lasting 639 years and, because the project could not actually begin in 2000, it started on September 5, 2001 — John Cage’s 89th birthday — and the scheduled conclusion moved to 2640.

And the performance began with something that, in any conventional concert hall, would be almost impossible to call music: silence.

When the organ was activated in September 2001, the score called for a long rest. For the first seventeen months, visitors heard only the machinery and the air moving through the instrument. The first actual notes arrived on February 5, 2003: a three-note chord. That chord remained in place for more than a year before the next change.
Since then, the music has progressed at a pace that makes even the slowest ballad seem frantic.
Notes are added or removed only every few years, according to a carefully planned sequence.
The organ itself was specially designed for the project, with its pipes gradually installed or removed as the composition evolves. Sandbags are used to keep the organ keys depressed, while a continuous supply of air allows the selected pipes to sound without a human musician sitting at the keyboard.
That makes every change of sound an event.
When the organ changes its chord, sometimes after years of uninterrupted sound, people travel to Halberstadt from around the world simply to hear it happen. There is no encore, no dramatic crescendo and no virtuoso stepping onto a stage. There is only the anticipation of a note changing — perhaps one of the smallest musical events imaginable, made extraordinary by the amount of time surrounding it.
The most recent change took place on February 5, 2024. Another pipe was added, altering the sound once again. The next changes will come in the years ahead, each one another tiny step through a musical composition whose audience is inevitably made up of generations rather than individuals.

There is something deeply Cageian about the whole idea. His music repeatedly challenged conventional ideas about what music is, where it begins and ends, and whether silence can be part of the composition. In Halberstadt, those questions have been stretched to almost unimaginable proportions. A listener can enter the church, hear a sound that has been continuing for years, stay for a few minutes and leave — knowing that the music will continue exactly as it was long after they are gone.
The project is therefore more than a concert, but it is an experiment in time, patience and human perspective.
It asks us to listen to something we cannot possibly hear in its entirety and to accept that some works of art can exist on a scale larger than a human lifetime.

The final note is scheduled for September 5, 2640.
Nobody alive today will hear it.
But somewhere in Halberstadt, the organ will keep breathing, the keys will remain pressed, and John Cage’s impossibly slow composition will continue moving forward — one almost imperceptible change at a time.
Music, in this case, has learned to wait longer than we ever could!