Titan of the avant-garde: John Cage's longest work wil outlast 'em all

An Organ Recital for the Very, Very Patient
By DANIEL J. WAKIN

HALBERSTADT, Germany, May 4 — If you miss Friday's musical happening at St. Burchardi Church in this eastern German town, no worries. There is always 2008. And the next year. And the one after that.

In fact, you have about six more centuries to hear developments in the work being performed, a version of a composition by John Cage called "As Slow as Possible." A group of musicians and town boosters has given the title a ridiculously extreme interpretation, by stretching the performance to 639 years.

Like the imperceptible movement of a glacier, a chord change was planned for Friday. Two pipes were to be removed from the rudimentary organ (which is being built as the piece goes on, with pipes added and subtracted as needed), eliminating a pair of E's. Cage devotees, musicians and the curious have trickled in to Halberstadt, a town about two and a half hours southwest of Berlin by train known as the birthplace of canned hot dogs and home to a collection of 18,000 stuffed birds.

"In these times, acceleration spoils everything," said Heinz-Klaus Metzger, a prominent musicologist whose chance comments at an organ conference nine years ago sparked the project. "To begin a performance with the perspective of more than a half-millennium — it's just a kind of negation of the lifestyle of today."

The only limitations on the length of the performance are the durability of the organ and the will of future generations.

For anyone keeping records, the performance is probably already the world's longest, even though it has barely begun. The organ's bellows began their whoosh on Sept. 5, 2001, on what would have been Cage's 89th birthday. But nothing was heard because the musical arrangement begins with a rest — of 20 months. It was only on Feb. 5, 2003, that the first chord, two G sharps and a B in between, was struck. Notes are sounding or ceasing once or twice a year — sometimes at even longer intervals — always on the fifth day of the month, to honor Cage, who died in 1992.

There are eight movements, and Cage specified that at least one be repeated. Each movement lasts roughly 71 years, just four years shy of the life expectancy of the average German male. There is no need to wait for the end of a movement for late seating: St. Burchardi is open six days a week, and the notes have been sounding continuously.

A whine can be faintly hard outside the front door of the church, a 1,000-year-old building that was once part of a Cistercian monastery and served as a pigsty when Halberstadt was a neglected industrial town in East Germany.

A cool blast of air comes through the open door, and the sound grows louder. After one spends some time within the bare stone walls, the urge to hum in unison proves irresistible. An electric bellows — about the size of three double beds in a row — sits in the left transept. Underground piping brings air to the organ in the right transept, which at this point is a wooden frame with six pipes. Small weights hold down wooden tabs: the keys. A plexiglass case muffles the sound. Neighbors complained that they could not sleep after the first notes sounded.

The place attracts people seeking a peaceful moment or communion with Cage's spirit. One student from the Juilliard School asked to spend a night in the church, said Georg Bandarau, the town's marketing director and manager of the Cage project. A Canadian writer who is going blind and making journeys to experience his other senses arrived Thursday.

The project's spirit is firmly in keeping with the proclivities of Cage, whose works pushed the boundaries of music and sought to meld life and art. One of his cardinal principles was to give the performer wide leeway. His most famous work may be "4' 33" " — in which the performer or performers sit silently for 4 minutes 33 seconds. Some consider him as much a philosopher as a musician.

Indeed, the Cage organ project is part serious musical endeavor, part intellectual exercise and part tourist attraction, the sort of thing that happens when the local worthies of a European town join with ambitious artists. And it has come to mean different things to different people.