Spronck V. Testing the Parameters of Music: The Halberstadt Performance of John Cage’s ORGAN2/ASLSP as Experimental System

Abstract

Is being performed at Halberstadt, Germany, by ORGAN2/ASL SP (1987), an organ piece by the American avant-garde composer, John Milton Cage (1912–1992), music theorist and pioneer in aleatorics, electronic music and the non-standard use of musical instruments, whom music critics have called one of the most influential American composers of the 20th, known for his radical attempts to subvert listeners’ conventional ideas of what music is and should be. With this performance, with a running time of 639 years and being the world’s longest performance of a piece of music that will reach its finale at 2640, with a break at 2319, the initiators of the ORGAN2/ASLSP organ piece at Halberstadt seek to explore in practice the direction of the musical movement set by the composer — “as slowly as possible” that Cage laid out for the work. ORGAN2/ASLSP invites listeners to reconsider what we mean by music: is something still music if the length of performance exceeds the length of human life? In essence, Organ2/ASLSP contains the idea of a paradigm shift stemming from the transformation of musical technology, presented by the composer as a transition from linear to complex thinking, from determinism to indeterminism, to the creation, instead of static art objects, of moving and changing artistic processes that predetermine a new technique and aesthetics of music performance. ORGAN2/ASLSP’s performance questions the boundaries of musical performance, from the role of the performer to the role of the listener, the material and temporal conditions of music, to articulate how slow is “as slow as possible”, prompting us to essentially reconsider the fundamental parameters of music.