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John Cage recital set to last 639 years recently witnessed a chord change
- jfengel 2y agoThis is the same guy who wrote 4'33", the silent piece. I kinda get that -- the 40000 Hz podcast gave it some good context: https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/433-by-john-cage-twenty-thousand-hertz/id1443417194?i=1000484979414 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.
- treetalker 2y ago> The slowest possible piece would have a fermata with an infinity sign over the first note, and that's it. 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.
- Svip 2y ago> Without having deeply researched the piece, I wonder if 639 years was chosen with any relation to Tesla's 3–6–9 idea. From http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2728595.stm 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.
- Retric 2y agoSaying “As slow as possible” isn’t followable any more than putting an infinity sign next to a note. You can’t know how long a piece of equipment lasts unless you decide to break it at an arbitrary time. These performers choose a completely arbitrary number independent of technical limitations, and then ran into technical limitations.
- mingus88 2y agoIn other words “interpretation” 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.
- jacobgkau 2y ago> Every performance ever done has been the performer interpreting the composer’s score and making it their own. 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."
- ehnto 2y agoAdam Neely and his band Sungazer did an interesting live experiment with his audiences, to figure out the slowest beat or pulse that people would be able to "feel" and dance to. Slowest possible isn't really as interesting in my opinion as slowest practical, which I think Neely and co's experiment explored. The track was Threshold on the album Perihelion. The whole album explored beat, pulse and timings as it relates to how people can actually feel and interact with music. Really interesting!
- markedathome 2y agois that also the album/live shows that had the audience dancing to the beats 1,2,3,4 which they thought was 4/4 but in such a way that the underlying time-signature was different?
- ehnto 2y agoYeah that's right, it was fun watching the crowd try to organise themselves to the right rythm based on those around them
- nkrisc 2y ago> The piece is called "As Slow As Possible", but it's not as slow as possible. In what way is it “possible” to play an infinitely long piece of music?
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> How do you set up a contraption to play for hundreds of years? How do you maintain it without interrupting the performance? All you need is more than one source of sound and you can maintain each of them while they're not playing.
- gus_massa 2y ago> How do you set up a contraption to play for hundreds of years? How do you maintain it without interrupting the performance? 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?)
- derbOac 2y agoSort of interesting that the Clock of the Long Now and Cage’s ORGAN2/ASLSP were conceived around the same time — 1989 and 1987, respectively. 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.
- brookst 2y agoI think you may be misinterpreting “possible” here. I’m shocked that it’s possible to get funding and interest to make a 639 year piece happen. It is unclear if it will be possible to complete. I do not think it would be possible to make a 10,000 year piece happen. 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.
- mingus88 2y agoNo musical performance is ever a 100% literal translation of the score. That’s pretty much impossible for any work. A score is not a set of MIDI instructions and a performer is not a sound card. 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.
- wizzwizz4 2y ago> The slowest possible piece would have a fermata with an infinity sign over the first note, and that's it. That piece has already been written. It's called ॐ.
- cess11 2y agoLess known than 4'33" being "silent" (which it's not) is that John Cage was an anarchist. "Both Fuller and Marshall McLuhan knew, furthermore, that work is now obsolete. We have invented machines to do it for us. Now that we have no need to do anything what shall we do? Looking at Fuller's Geodesic World Map we see that the earth is a single island. Oahu. We must give all the people all they need to live in any way they wish. Our present laws protect the rich from the poor. If there are to be laws we need ones that begin with the acceptance of poverty as a way of life. We must make the earth safe for poverty without dependence on government." https://monoskop.org/images/9/9c/Cage_John_Anarchy_New_York_City_January_1988.pdf https://monoskop.org/images/9/9c/Cage_John_Anarchy_New_York_... (PDF) A shorter read here: https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/09/15/john-cage-silence-human-nature/ https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/09/15/john-cage-silence-...
- kleiba 2y ago[flagged]
- brookst 2y agoWhile any mass produced off the shelf baloney runs the risk of being transformed into art at a moment’s notice.
- seydor 2y agoavant garde is so 20th century
- brookst 2y agoI weep for the future of post-post-modernism.
- sayamqazi 2y agoI bet every generation before us thought the same and every generation after us will think the same.
- josefritzishere 2y agoThis is one of the core tenets in the mythology of social conservatism. This notion that somehow thigns cam somehow stay the same... forever. This is usually expressed with wording around values, tradition and customs.
- jacobgkau 2y agoAs opposed to the core tenant of the mythology of social liberalism, the notion that somehow things can continuously change, at infinite speeds to an infinite degree, without blowing everything up at some point? 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.
- zombot 2y ago[flagged]
- wtcactus 2y ago[flagged]
- piva00 2y agoYour view about art is just too constrained by an appeal to aesthetic beauty. Art's beauty can come in many obtuse ways, and doesn't even need to encompass aesthetic beauty. The exploration of philosophy through art has its own beauty, it's not an easily digestible beauty but it's a kind of. What you show is just a complete lack of perception to other ways to appreciate art, and for that your soul is a bit more empty than it could be. Instead of looking at art from this productivity view try to be more curious, challenge yourself on what is even the notion of art and what it can give to us that is ineffable in other forms... Right now you are just too miopic to even be able to appreciate art as a whole, you just want the product of art, not the process, meaning, and philosophical questions it can spark in you. To understand art takes effort, it tells me a lot about people when they show how uncurious and set in their ways they are about art, they just simply aren't free people.
- wtcactus 2y ago[flagged]
- airstrike 2y agoHear, hear! This point is beautifully made by philosopher Roger Scruton in his "Why Beauty Matters" https://vimeo.com/groups/832551/videos/549715999 https://vimeo.com/groups/832551/videos/549715999 Unfortunately I think too many people are still falling for that nonsense
- piva00 2y agoSure, keep being uncurious and ignorant, it's all your choice, it's you who is missing out. "Fake intellectuals" is just... Sad, devaluing whole bodies of work simply because you cannot understand them, instead of attempting to curiously explore that you prefer to use a thought-terminating cliché and embrace your ignorance as supreme... All the while you live during a time where all information and knowledge in the world is there for you to access for free. It's just... Sad to live that way but ignorance is bliss since it's just so much easier to reject anything that challenges you.
- comrade1234 2y agoSomeone must have played it sped up? Is the music public?
- cactacea 2y agoYou're missing the point.
- hinkley 2y agoWe’re missing the performance otherwise. Unless you’re immortal.
- BoingBoomTschak 2y agoIs there a point?
- salynchnew 2y agoYes, but the piece is specifically composed to be played "as slowly as possible" fwiw.
- dagw 2y agoHere's a 90 second edit of a 24 hour performance where they have just included the chord changes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vv_bXRMTJog https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vv_bXRMTJog Fair warning, it sounds very jarring and disjointed.
- LorenDB 2y agohttps://archive.ph/rHOsC https://archive.ph/rHOsC
- throw310822 2y agoOddly enough, Bach's BWV 639 is one of my favourite (organ) pieces. But it appears to be just a coincidence, since the length was decided as the number of years since the construction of the first organ in Halberstadt to the new millennium.
- _petronius 2y agoSome art-haters in the comments, so to defend this piece of contemporary art for a moment: one thing I love about it is a commitment to the long future of art, creativity, and civilization. What does it take to keep an instrument playing for six hundred years? To commit to that idea -- like the century-long projects of cathedral building in the middle ages, or the idea of planting trees you won't live to see mature -- is (to me) the awesome thing about the Halberstadt performance. All rendered in a medium (church organ) that has existed for an even longer time. It's a pretty hopeful, optimistic view of the future in a time of high uncertainty, but also represents a positive argument: it's worth doing these things because they are interesting, weird, and fun, and because they represent a continuity with past and future people we will never meet. Plus, you can already buy a ticket to the finale, so your distant descendants can go see it :)
- hbsbsbsndk 2y agoIt's not surprising that people who love AI and NFTs are willfully ignorant about what makes art meaningful. It's a sadly transactional view of the world.
- mingus88 2y agoIt’s obvious that many people in this industry believe themselves to be supremely intelligent and curious hacker types, yet they obviously never taken a humanities course. They have a huge blind spot that they aren’t even aware of, or worse just devalue the entire history of human thought and creation that doesn’t involve hard science.
- dontlikeyoueith 2y agoMost of them don't value hard science either.
- kristopolous 2y agobarbrook wrote an essay about this 30 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology Still on the nose.
- stavros 2y ago> In theory, a pipe organ can sound indefinitely, so long as it receives adequate power and its pedals are pressed continually. [..] Thus, the only threats to this performance are the survival of the organ, the will of the unborn and the erratic tides of arts funding. And, you know, power outages.
- chmod775 2y agoHalberstadt seems to last have had a power outage in 2023. I wonder if the organ has battery backup...
- mingus88 2y agoTIL that there were no organ works in the history of humanity until electrical power was invented
- stavros 2y agoOh I didn't realize we had donkeys powering this organ 24/7 for 600 years.
- mingus88 2y agoPart of the wonder with this work is thinking of how to overcome such a problem 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.
- teruakohatu 2y agoIf it’s contemporary art, then they may well have planned to have someone come in with a sledgehammer and smash it to bits in front of audience who paid to hear the next note change or on some other date of significance. It won’t be the first time an artist has done this.
- soupfordummies 2y agoAh dammit, just take it once again from the top
- salynchnew 2y agoI am so happy that this is in my HN feed today. I wish there was more stuff like this, both in my feed and in the world.
- test1235 2y ago>The anticipation was palpable, with at least six other tourists wandering the cold brick hall, there to hear the final hours of this loud and, after a time, torturous sound. Just reading that line alone brightened up my morning. You can admire something and still find it a bit silly.
- eszed 2y agoI find many things admirable because they're silly. :-)
- gweinberg 2y agoIt doesn't make sense to me that the piece should start with a 17 month rest. Surely it doesn't really start until the first note is played?
- itishappy 2y agoEver been to see an orchestra play? In my opinion, the part where the conductor puts his hands up and the audience and orchestra both grow quiet in anticipation of the start of the piece is semantic.
- kbutler 2y agoIn a live orchestra performance, the conductor raises his hands. The audience quiets in anticipation. He gives an up tick indicating the beginning of the music, then the downbeat of the start of the first measure. No sound is heard. The conductor continues to mark time. The silence is deep...profound. The conductor continues to mark the time of the passing measures. The audience listens. At some point, positive sound breaks the silence - suddenly, loudly destroying the stillness! Or possibly very nearly silently - at the uncertain threshold of perception, the audible music begins...
- lazystar 2y ago> the audible music begins... right, so it begins when the music starts playing?
- renewiltord 2y ago[flagged]
- itishappy 2y agoLet us know when you convince a few hundred people it's interesting enough to visit!
- renewiltord 2y agoAre you kidding me? I have 8 billion listeners. And a new one born every second.
- itishappy 2y agoHow many of them do you think know your name?
- AlexandrB 2y agoSo art is all about the identity of the author?
- itishappy 2y agoI'd say it's about connecting with the consumer. The connection doesn't need to extend to the author, but it should probably extend to the art itself. I'll rephrase my question: How many of those 8 billion people care about and/or are aware of Rene's art?
- renewiltord 2y ago"A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose bark their name is not written" - ancient Chinese proverb.
- jacobgkau 2y agoThe few hundred people who visited during the 17-month rest are just as silly as someone who'd be convinced to see a random forum poster's millennium rest, that's the kicker.
- fullshark 2y ago* mimes jerk off motion * The art community is no longer about celebrating humanity or beauty or inspiring people, it's instead about proving its intellectual / class superiority, that they don't have to work all day in the fields and worry about other people's problems like the common folk do, but instead can pontificate about nonsense with the best of them.
- NelsonMinar 2y agoHere's a video (with sound) of one of the other chord changes. It didn't occur to me they'd just swap in a pipe instead of pressing a key on a keyboard. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3BBgQPuPI0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3BBgQPuPI0
- curtisszmania 2y ago[dead]
- labrador 2y ago639 years? Big deal, The Long Now foundation built a clock to last 10,000 years. I hate John Cage since I got his massive world-wide hit 4′33″ stuck in my head.
- pfd1986 2y agoThe foundation cocktail place in SF has some art on the wall that changes every minute. I can't remember if by John Cage or someone else..
- muppetman 2y agoI just need you to know that I went and googled "John Cage 4'33" " and now I am quite upset with you for this comment!!!
- speed_spread 2y agoOne thing I like about 4′33″ is that it is very compressible, especially the studio version. The live version, a little less so.
- labrador 2y agoI like it stretched. The 800% slower version is amazing.
- margalabargala 2y ago> The Long Now foundation built a clock to last 10,000 years The Long Now Foundation is attempting to build a clock to last 10,000 years. Construction began close to a decade ago, and there is no estimated completion date. Construction of the clock may well last 10,000 years.
- bell-cot 2y agoObligatory XKCD reference: https://xkcd-time.fandom.com/wiki/Hugo_Award#Acceptance_Speech https://xkcd-time.fandom.com/wiki/Hugo_Award#Acceptance_Spee...
- gred 2y agoThis makes me think of the Hari Seldon recordings which play over the course of centuries in the "Foundation" books by Isaac Asimov.
- Carrok 2y agoTo be a bit pedantic, those recordings are played at real time for normal speech, and have gaps between anything being played of centuries. They don't play continuously for that long, unlike this project which does play continuously.
- globular-toast 2y agoSomething you realise about a melody is its not about the notes, it's about the intervals. Nor is rhythm about the time at which it is played, rather it is about the relative time between events. So you could argue the music is only really happening when things change, as they did on this day. So I see this more as a time capsule similar to Seldon crises rather than a piece that is continually playing, but your interpretation can be different. Cage's 4'33" certainly challenges my interpretation.
- andyjohnson0 2y agoRelated: Longplayer: a one-thousand year long composition https://longplayer.org/ https://longplayer.org/
- uwagar 2y ago[flagged]
- watersb 2y agoRemember where you were when the eighth drop of pitch fell in Queensland? Man, that was wild. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment
- johnea 2y agoSo, an organ changed to a new chord, and I'm supposed to pay to _read_ about it? I find the subject mildly interesting, but the paywalled internet is just another sign of end stage capitalism...
- moon2 2y agoFinally some good news.
- encom 2y agoPaywalled. https://archive.ph/Ko4pe https://archive.ph/Ko4pe
- neuroelectron 2y agoHow about that