HN Reader

Some 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 :)

Less 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_... (PDF)

A shorter read here:

https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/09/15/john-cage-silence-...

639 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.

It 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?

Someone must have played it sped up? Is the music public?

I 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.

Remember 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

Oddly 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.

Ah dammit, just take it once again from the top

This makes me think of the Hari Seldon recordings which play over the course of centuries in the "Foundation" books by Isaac Asimov.

avant garde is so 20th century

Here'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

> 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.

Finally some good news.

Related:

Longplayer: a one-thousand year long composition

https://longplayer.org/

How about that

Paywalled.

https://archive.ph/Ko4pe

This 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-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.

Obligatory XKCD reference: https://xkcd-time.fandom.com/wiki/Hugo_Award#Acceptance_Spee...

So, 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...

* 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.