Reflections on John Cage’s ORGAN2/ASLSP
words by Madita Schrott
On September 5th, 2001 an organ piece began to play in a desacralized church in a German town. It started with silence. Air pushed out of the organ’s bellows without entering a pipe. The soundless wind wasn’t replaced by its first note until one and a half years later. To this day the composition is still playing, notes are changing in intervals of months or years, and won’t stop resounding until September of 2640.
The 639-year-long musical piece is a project attempting to realize the vision of composer John Cage. He wrote ORGAN2/ASLSP as part of his number pieces, a body of 40 compositions following a fixed scheme. The written number represents the amount of musicians meant to play the piece, the superscript number which piece in the cycle it represents. So TWO6 is a composition for two musicians, and the sixth of its kind. In this piece, he added the description to play “as softly as possible (nearly inaudible)” and instructed the pianist to press the keys so
carefully and the violinist to barely move his bow, as to hardly let any sounds exist.
ORGAN2/ASLSP is played by no musician at all, instead by a self-sufficient organ, ASLSP stands for “as slow as possible”. The piece's premiere performance lasted half an hour, but since an organ can hold a note infinitely, a foundation in Cage’s name decided to take his instructions as imagined, or even beyond.
John Cage’s compositions were always closer to philosophy than music. To him, all sounds, tones, and noises have the same importance. The performance of his arguably most famous work, 4 '33, consists of Cage entering the stage, sitting down on a grand piano, and not making a single sound for four minutes and 33 seconds. Instead of him playing, it is the anticipation of the audience that turns all other sounds, or silence, into a musical piece, and hence makes 4’ 33 sound different each time. “Everything we do is music”, Cage once said. "Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.”
As a young student, he was told by his professor, composer Arnold Schönberg, that he lacked any sense of harmony. He told him he would be more likely to hit a rock wall than ever become a great composer. With these words in his heart, Cage decided to hit this rock wall as hard as he could, and revolutionized the way we define music to this day.
Cage described his music as de-compositions: The composer's subjectivity, his inclinations and dislikes, should be minimized. To achieve this, some of his compositions were partially or entirely written following the principles of aleatoric music, where it isn’t the composer, but chance that decides on the sequence of notes. ORGAN2/ASLSP is an example of this: Cage used a computer program which randomly chose one note after the next, to keep the composition unspoiled by his own prejudice.
For the past 23 years ORGAN2/ASLSP has been playing at St. Burchardi in Halberstadt. The desacralized chapel, now only a skeleton of a church, stripped of any devotional objects and decorations, appealed to the John Cage Organ Foundation as a perfectly bleak place to let the extensively stretched-out notes speak, or play, for themselves.
While the small German town has no connection to Cage, the local cathedral holds one of the oldest organs of the modern age. The duration of the performance of ORGAN2/ASLSP was inspired by the age of this organ. Completed in 1362, 631 years before the longest musical piece was planned to begin in 2000, the piece would last 631 years as well. After the initially planned inauguration date in 2000 could not be realized due to a lack of funding, it was moved to September 5th, 2001, the day which would have been Cage’s 88th birthday.
Since its beginning, the notes of ORGAN2/ASLSP have changed only 16 times, lastly just a few months ago in February of 2024. The next note change will happen on August 5th, 2026. Each note change is treated as a ritual. The pipes are added and taken in a ceremonial way, carefully fitted into the organ, to commemorate the new notes sounding. Like this, something as seemingly insignificant as adding a d’ and an e’ note, as it happened in February, turns into an occasion to celebrate music in its most simple form.
When Cage was asked about death, and responded “I can’t wait”, he knew there were great things waiting for him.
