Klarinet Archive - Posting 000697.txt from 2001/09

From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay)
Subj: [kl] 639 years
Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2001 16:15:19 -0400

A musical journey that will take more than six centuries began yesterday
in a small town in eastern Germany. The mayor of the town of Halberstadt
launched "The John Cage Organ Project", an effort that will begin with
the construction of an organ and continue with a performance intended to
last639 years. The piece, by experimental and controversial American
composer John Cage, is called "Organ2/ASLSP" ("As Slow As Possible").
Cage intended his original piano version to last 20 minutes. Organizers
of the Halberstadt project plan to extend the piece over half a
millennium to commemorate the completion of the town's first famous
organ 639 years ago.

The performance will officially begin on September 5, 2001, but the
first chord won't be sounded for another year-and-a-half. The head of
the John Cage Organ Foundation told Agence France Presse they're drawing
out the tempo to that extreme to stand in marked contrast to the
breathless pace of modern life.

> As I understand it, the performance was at the initiative of the critic
> Heinz-Klaus Metzger, the composer/scholar Rainer Riehn and
> composer/organist Jakob Ullman. They were inspired by a passage from
> Harry Partch's _Genesis of a Music_ wherein that "fateful day at
> Halberstadt" is chronicled as introducing the tyranny of the twelve
> part division of the octave.
>
> Daniel Wolf
> Budapest

> In its conception of time, this performance seems to share aspirations
> with the 10,000 year clock planned by the Long Now Foundation: a clock
> that ticks once a year, it s hand advances once a century, etc.
>
> The Foundation's website is at <http://www.longnow.org/> , but
> there's an interesting brief consideration of the possible
> consequences of building such a clock at
> <http://www.longnow.org/10kclock/clock.htm> , in particular
> questioning whether it is necessary to build such a clock, or whether
> it would be better to perpetuate the idea of such a clock's existence,
> rather than it existing as an object. It is interesting to hear that
> at Halberstadt a similar project of large-scale time is taking place
> in a less tangible form, that of a performance, than an autonomous
> object.
>
> Ben Harper

For anyone who might be interested in more details, the German new music
journal "Positionen" has published several reports about the
Cage/Halberstadt project over the last year.

Tony
--
_________ Tony Pay
|ony:-) 79 Southmoor Rd Tony@-----.uk
| |ay Oxford OX2 6RE GMN artist: http://www.gmn.com
tel/fax 01865 553339

... BASIC isn't; C stands for Confusing...

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