Posted by pseudolus 3/31/2025
I don't think most social conservatives would agree with your interpretation that they want everything to stay the same forever. Rather, the "values, tradition, and customs" that you're crapping on are something to reflect on and guide change in a hopefully more peaceful, sustainable, and manageable way.
"Conservatives want everything frozen in time forever" is a straw-man to support a false dilemma.
Longplayer: a one-thousand year long composition
And, you know, power outages.
It’s actually a very optimistic work for Cage. The idea that we could have a continuous performance for hundreds of years, without ever being interrupted by wars or disasters.
I think it is amazing that someone has risen to the challenge to try and perform this, and if they are successful what that means for us as a society that it was allowed to happen
I have a pessimistic outlook. All it will take is one bad actor to interrupt this performance that could potentially involve thousands to maintain. It feels inevitable that this will fail. Nevertheless, this in itself is a statement on us as a species and what a wonderful work this is to have provoked such a thing.
It won’t be the first time an artist has done this.
I kinda get that -- the 40000 Hz podcast gave it some good context:
https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/433-by-john-cage-twent...
Maybe they'll also explain the point of this. The piece is called "As Slow As Possible", but it's not as slow as possible. The slowest possible piece would have a fermata with an infinity sign over the first note, and that's it. Maybe the rest of it would be a jaunty little tune that would never be played in context. ("Shave and a haircut", perhaps?)
As a stunt, it's moderately interesting. How do you set up a contraption to play for hundreds of years? How do you maintain it without interrupting the performance? But it's less interesting than the 10,000 year clock.
But then the piece would never be completely played, which seems like a requirement for Cage's musical game / art / philosophical statement.
Moreover, your hypothetical piece could still technically be played at a high tempo. It seems like the point of the Cage piece is to play it at the slowest possible tempo, not over the greatest length of time possible (and that's why the fermata idea doesn't fit). (So while you're correct that 639 years doesn't represent the slowest tempo possible (just play it over 640 years instead, right?) it's the idea of extreme slowness that's interesting. Or perhaps "as slow as possible" refers to the tempo that really was as slow as possible (at the time it was set up) because of technological constraints.
Without having deeply researched the piece, I wonder if 639 years was chosen with any relation to Tesla's 3–6–9 idea.
Edit: It looks like the 639 years comes from the "performer(s)" who set up the equipment, not from Cage himself. The composer only gave the instruction to play it as slowly as possible, which plays into the technological-limitations idea above, I think.
From http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2728595.stm
> They settled on 639 years because the Halberstadt organ was 639 years old in the year 2000.
These performers choose a completely arbitrary number independent of technical limitations, and then ran into technical limitations.
It’s so funny coming from a musical background and reading all these comments of people who have no idea what they are talking about criticizing one of the worlds most famous modern composers
Every performance ever done has been the performer interpreting the composer’s score and making it their own. Nobody want to hear a robotic perfectly accurate recreation of what is on the page, because even the act of transcription alters the composer’s intent. The score is not the art!
There is no perfection in art. It’s all subjective, by the literal definition of art.
To be fair, there are multiple lines of thought on that matter. Some conductors enjoy "making it their own," while other conductors attempt to discover and reproduce the composer's original intention as closely as possible. Toscanini comes to mind as a historical example of the latter, although I'm sure there are others.
At a certain point, a composer needs to provide information to compose a piece. What if someone wrote a "solo" that just said "improvise" and contained no notes at all? The argument being presented above is that Cage did the tempo equivalent of that. This is a philosophy argument at best, not "people who have no idea what they're talking about."
It simply can never be perfect. Down to the acoustics of the venue, there will always be aspects of a performance that are lost to time and can never be reproduced. And how can we even know, since no recordings exist (and if they did, that recording would introduce its own artifacts).
How many people dance to a boureé today? Can any performance of one really be be accurate outside the context of dance? Sitting politely in a huge recital hall is no at all accurate
And even then, the music falls on modern ears. We hear and understand music completely differently than ancient people did. Can we even consider anything to be accurate, since Art is experienced?
I love renaissance music, and listen to as many recordings as I can where the performer uses a vihuela, theorbo, lute, etc. It's a totally nerdy pursuit. But it’s only “accurate” to a point
The bottom line for me is that Art is subjective. Do it in the way that satisfies your urge to create. As soon as it leaves your body, it belongs to the rest of us to interpret and experience. There are no right or wrong ways to express yourself.
The point is both are impossible to achieve, not that nobody can make a related performance.
So you could interpret it a slow tempo you can definitely finish, a tempo you might finish, etc but actual limits are not really predictable.
As with all things, the contraption is not the hard part. It’s the supporting civilization, society, economic context, and will of generations of people.
Cage’s game here is to question the entire scaffolding of art, not the pigments of the paint.
In what way is it “possible” to play an infinitely long piece of music?
The whole album explored beat, pulse and timings as it relates to how people can actually feel and interact with music. Really interesting!
You play it with an orchestra (or perhaps a quartet is enough). Players may take turns to eat, sleep, and even have work-life balance. They also may retire (or die) and be replaced by new musicians. (How much would it cost?)
This post is wild because “what is the point of this” seems to be complexly divorced from the human drive to create and express one’s self.
That piece has already been written. It's called ॐ.
Also worth noting the clock's name is from Brian Eno, who has expressed interest in developing chimes for the clock. So Cage's work was kinda presaging the clock.
All you need is more than one source of sound and you can maintain each of them while they're not playing.