Okay ... this was forwarded to me about
three days ago ... and I have been TRYING to restrain myself from forwarding
it to f_minor. I really have been trying.
But I failed. Here it is. Read it and weep.
Bob / Elmer
===============
The first notes in the longest and
slowest piece of music in history, designed to go on for 639 years, are being
played on a German church organ on Wednesday.
The three notes, which will last for
a year-and-a-half, are just the start of the piece, called As Slow As
Possible.
Composed by late avant-garde composer John Cage, the
performance has already been going for 17 months -- although all that has been
heard so far is the sound of the organ's bellows being
inflated.
The music will be played in
Halberstadt, a small town renowned for its ancient organs in central
Germany.
It was originally a 20-minute piece
for piano, but a group of musicians and philosophers decided to take the title
literally and work out how long the longest possible piece of music could
last.
They settled on 639 years because the
Halberstadt organ was 639 years old in the year 2000.
"We started
discussing -- what is as slow as possible for the organ?" Swedish composer and
organist Hans-Ola Ericsson told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
"We, a
group of theologians, musicologists, philosophers, composers and organists,
met during a couple of years solely to discuss this question. It was rather
wonderful to have one topic to discuss at length."
"We came up with the answer that the
piece could last for the duration of the organ -- that is the lifetime of an
organ."
Cage composed the original piece
before his death in 1992, and Mr Ericsson said Cage would have liked what they
had done with it.
"It's a sound that we give to the future to take care
of, and hopefully the aesthetics and the ideas of John Cage will manage to
survive."
The first note is due to be struck at 1800 local time (1700
GMT) on Wednesday.
The performance follows a legal case in which
composer Mike Batt was forced to pay a six-figure sum to Cage's publishers,
who accused him of plagiarising a silent piece of
music.