"Until I die, there will be sounds," wrote John Cage, the Andy Warhol of music. "And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music."
Even Cage, the radical, hugely influential composer who died in 1993, may have been surprised to learn just how long some of his own sounds would linger in that future. A performance of his Organ2/ASLSP began in an 11th-century church in Halberstadt, Germany, on what would have been Cage's 88th birthday, Sept. 5, 2000. It will end in 2639.
Barring rapid and awesome advances in cryonics, none of us will be around to hear the concluding notes of that performance, but there's a no less remarkable opportunity to experience the piece this week at Towson University. Diane Luchese, an accomplished organist and associate professor of music theory, will condense Organ2/ASLSP into a mere 15 hours, give or take a minute or two.
"I'm pumped up," says Luchese, whose performance Thursday begins at 8:45 a.m. and ends at 11:41 p.m.
She was inspired to tackle this project after visiting the performance-in-nearly-eternal-progress in Halberstadt, where the meaning of Cage's acronym in the title - "As SLow aS Possible" - has been taken way literally. Organ2/ASLSP contains eight movements of often long-held, dense harmonic clusters and moments of silence. The player is free to choose sonorities and dynamic levels. Some passages suggest tone coloring that is "ethereal, or profound, or quirky," Luchese says. "And I think in some spots you should just rock it out."
Cage left no guidance as to duration. The 1987 premiere lasted only a half-hour ("that seems short," Luchese says). At Halberstadt, a conference of musicologists, organists and philosophers took a cue from local history. The first organ with a modern keyboard was built in that German town in 1361, 639 years before the millennium. Organizers chose to start the piece in 2000 and continue for 639 years, with the life-span of each note and rest in the score determined mathematically.
Luchese came up with her own formula. "I wanted the performance to last a full working day," the organist says. She measured the length of the printed score with a ruler, and decided that 1 inch would equal six minutes. For the concert, she will have a clock and spread sheets that contain directions of when to depress and release the notes.
