Short Stuff: John Cage's 639 Year Concert

probably heard of named John Cage. Yeah, John Cage. I knew his name sounded familiar, but I couldn't quite place it until I ran across his piece, or mention of his piece, four thirty three. Yeah, four minutes and thirty three seconds. And that in and of itself made John Cage famous, even to people like me who aren't into avant guard twentieth century American composing. He should say what it is, because it really explains everything we need to

explain about John Cage. So thirty three is a composition that's just four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence. There's no instruments playing a single note whatsoever, Like if you came out on stage and did four thirty three at a piano, you'd just sit there for four minutes and thirty three seconds. Have you watched it performed. I haven't. I'll bet it is really uncomfortable in a lot of ways. Well,

it's interesting. It's it's performance art in a way, because like you said, it's it's not like you can just sit in a room and say that's your show. Like it's it's to be performed. Like the German Philharmonic on YouTube says, this is four thirty three. The conductor gets up there, raises his hands, and then no one does anything. Wow.

He goes into the second movement, indicates that with a hand movement, then goes into the third movement and no one does anything, and everyone rub you know, burst out into applause at the end, and you can't help but just sort of snicker a little bit. The thing is, though, if you're like, I hate John Cage more than I've ever hated anybody, just from hearing that, like that's just so stupid, just stop. You need to hear from a John Cage interpreter slash enthusiast named rainier O Nugebauer and

I think how stuff works. Interviewed Nugebauer for this article, and Nusbauer explains, like four thirty three is not just some goofy performance piece like John Cage created that, because to him, that's not silence. It's there's no intentional sounds being made, but there's plenty of sounds going on around you. And this is four minutes and thirty three seconds of hearing completely unpredictable, unplanned sounds in the environment around you

while this composition is going on. And when you hear that, it's kind of like, um, it's kind of like that moment when the psychedelics kick in on Homer and that Chili Pepper episode. He's like, whoa, that's what happened to me at least, And I suddenly am like, I like John Cage a lot. He's very neat, and it just keeps going from there. Really yeah, or in the case of the performance in Journey that I watch, you would hear right, are you in here? Vs? Dos? Vases dos?

What does that mean? Means? What is that? Okay? And he also had another quote about him that I think kind of sums it up to, which is what we call silence for Cage means only the absence of intended sounds, right, So that was his jam, and that leads us to the six hundred and thirty nine year long concert otherwise known as Organ Squared Slash a sl SP, which stands for as slow as possible. And if you're like, wait a minute, just trust us. It stands for as slow

as possible. Yeah, so maybe let's take a break there and we'll explain all this gobbedygook. So getting to as slow as possible as LSP. That wasn't the original name for it. I don't know that there was an actual

name for it. I think in nineteen eighty five when you first composed it, right, it was x y z PDQ, So I think it was in nineteen eighty seven, two years after he first composed that, he was like, we're gonna call it as slow as Possible, and that became not just the title for this piece, but the actual purpose of the piece. So it was to take this eight sheets of music that he composed that was as

LSP and play it as slowly as you could. And it was very John Cage from what I understand to be, like, I'm not going to tell you how slow to do. Figure out how what that means to you the artist. You interpret it however you want. The point is just play it as slow as you can. And that is one of his I think one of his more famous works as well too. Yeah, and this was I listened to a like eighteen minute version today. It is an

organ piece, obviously, it's called organ squared. An organ is key because you're not You can't count on someone to blow into a saxophone for thirty minutes or three hours or six hundred and thirty nine years, but an organ as it makes a constant, consistent sound. And if you play this thing over eighteen minutes or whatever, you will hear chord changes and you will hear something. But it's still like people like Brian Eno come around and I get the feeling. John Kade just like you know, here,

hold my absence of beer, my invisible beer. Because you think you're doing something artsy and weird. Get a load of this. I will think that probably John Cage is one of Brian ENO's like like gods. Yeah, I think

they were buddies obviously. So so to kind of explain this asl a s lsp um if you if you had the notes da da da dah, right, and you played them normally like that for as LSP that first uh might last a minute and a half, and then the next one might last five minutes, the next there and then they're like you said, there's chord changes, but they're just not close together. So it's like taking a

compressed like normal song and spreading it out. Um. But you're doing this in a live performance, so it's really cool and that's the basis of it. Um. But there's there was an interpretation that came along of it that we're talking about today that wasn't actually created by John Cage. But it is the most John Cage idea that wasn't created by John Cage. One of the greatest homages I've

ever heard to anybody. Yeah, I mean, if there's an avant garde music heaven, John Cage is still smiling at the idea that someone took his as slow as possible thing and really ran with it. And this was at

the idea was sort of born. It sounds like at a organ symposium in nineteen ninety eight when people were kind of saying like, well, again, it's an organ piece, we can go as slow as we want with this thing, because you can make that sound forever if you've got, you know, a can of beans to sit on a key. And it's not like a piano string or it gets har string or a woodwind that will eventually fade away even with the most sustained. So like, where can we

take this thing? Like? How far into the future can we take it? How long? They said, how far can we take it? How long can we make it? There should have been lyrics to this, and they said, well how about this. There was this cathedral called Halberstots Cathedral that was kind of where the organ was born, and like the modern design for what we know as a keyboard took place, and they said, what a perfect place

to do this thing. And I will let you explain why it's six hundred and thirty nine years because that is super kind of fun and John Cage would love it. It's very generous of you, Chuck, thank you. Sure, I will do that. So the reason it was the perfect place was because that first keyboard was created in thirteen sixty one and this organ symposium, I guess was happening around two thousand and they decided that what they would do is use the millennium as a fulcrum between past

and future. It's a good way to put it. Yeah, and so they said, well, thirteen sixty one all the way to two thousand is six hundred and thirty nine years. So what we're going to do is honor both John Cage and the creation of the modern keyboard back in thirteen sixty one by putting on a performance in Halberstat where the organ was first created or the modern one was of as LSP that will last six hundred and

thirty nine years. Pretty great. And again I'm sure John Cage out there in the in the ether is just loving this. Just a couple of years ago, in September of twenty twenty, they were like, it's time to change the chord. And that's I don't know. Do you know if they have a set, did they literally divide it out? Yeah, they're okay, So it's it's at an exactly timed yes, interval between this one and the last one. Yeah, under normal circumstances, if you were playing as LSP, like you

just play it as slow as you wanted to. But because now they're trying to contain it within a certain time, they would have had to have calculated ahead of time, so they did the math to make it even Stephen, I guess, and the chord change came up, came due on September five, twenty twenty and a bunch of people. There's a couple of videos of it, one which is the real thing. Another I don't know if you saw this one, but it had the whole ceremony leading up to it, and right when it got to the chord

change and went to a metal song. Oh really like the they overdubbed it. Yeah, I got to see that one. It's very surprising, all of it. So, yeah, so if you were in this, if you visit this church in Halberstot, you're just going to you there's an organ there that's playing a single note and has been playing it for maybe years. And actually, Chuck, I saw that the most recent chord change was February fifth, twenty twenty two. So

there's been a more recent one. Okay, yeah, so the first one I think seven years before that, and then two years after that. I'm not sure when the next chord changes, but I'm sure you could find out. I couldn't find out, but maybe you can. Oh, so it's not at a regular interval. Then no, so no, I'm sorry, it's not so they basically are playing it. Yeah, they yes,

it's not a regular interval. It's they figured out, like this note should last this long, this note should last so that the whole piece ends in twenty six forty six hundred and thirty nine years after it started. Okay, wow, amazing. It is amazing. Doesn't that make it even more amazing that it's not at regular intervals? Yeah? I figured it was like, you know, every one hundred and three years will change the corrid or whatever. Yeah, no, I'm sorry

I didn't catch that. But that's so you can go to this church and Halberd Stott and visit this organ. That's right now as we speak, playing a single note, and we'll be playing that note for probably years to come, until the next chord change. I wonder if the interval was based on the original squashed composition, like I wonder if there was an interval that Cage had. In other words, yeah, I wonder too. All right, not to look that up,

but it's pretty cool. So so one person put it that the work is no longer on a human time scale, and it can't be played by a single person any longer, which is really cool because they say, like they likened it to building monuments in cathedrals, that those things took hundreds of years in some cases and now no one, single person or group of people built them. Generations did and that's what's going to happen with this composition being played. Amazing.

I think so too. It's good stuff, good pick, Chuck. This is one of the coolest how Stuff Works articles I've ever run across, So thanks for it. If you want to know more about it, go check it out on How Stuff Works John Cage in the six hundred and thirty Year Long Concert, and then also check out Universes in Universe. They have a little article on it which is pretty informative. And since I said it's premie informative everybody and Chuck said, yeah, that means short stuffs out.

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