99% Invisible - As Slow As Possible

Episode Date: July 9, 2024

When you go to a concert, you might try to get there right when the doors open. Or perhaps you take your time and skip the opening act. But generally, you want to be there when the show starts. In February, everyone who went to a concert in Halberstadt, Germany, showed up 23 years late. The performance is of a piece called ORGAN2/ASLSP. ASLSP stands for “as slow as possible,” which is how the composer meant for it to be played, and this particular day would involve a chord change. The last time ORGAN2/ASLSP had a chord change was in 2022, and this new chord will play until the next change, in August, 2026. There is a change the year after that, and the following year, and so on, until the year 2640. The full performance is meant to last 639 years. Reporter Gabe Bullard travels to Germany to witness the chord change and to discover why such a concert is even happening in the first place.As Slow As Possible

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. When you go to a concert, you might try to get there right when the doors open. Or maybe you take your time and skip the opening act. But generally, you want to be there when the show starts. In February, everyone who went to a concert in Haberstadt, Germany showed up 23 years late. Alright. Getting ready to head to the train station. One of those late comers was Gabe Bullard. Gabe's a reporter living in Basel, Switzerland.

So he took the train a few hours into Germany to a pretty rural part of the country. Next stop, Alberstadt. Alberstadt is an old medieval town, like what you'd expect from a storybook. There are timber-frame houses packed close together, curving cobblestone streets. But there wasn't time for sightseeing. The concert was well underway. And Gabe was planning to leave early, because from this concert, everyone walks out early.

It's a performance of a piece called Organ 2 ASLSP. ASLSP stands for As Slow As Possible, which is how the composer meant for it to be played. And that's how it is being played. Very slowly. And the reason I came all the way to Halberstadt now is because this was no ordinary day of the performance. I came to see a chord change. The last time Organ 2 ASLSP had a chord change was 2022, and this new chord will play until the next change in August of 2026. There's a change the

year after that and the year after that and so on until the year 2640. The full performance is meant to last 639 years. Walking up to the concert, looks like this is it. Gonna walk in. ["The Church of a Nun's Cloister"] The performance is in the Church of a Nun's Cloister, founded in the 13th century. It's an old building, with bare stone walls, a floor that's mostly gravel, and a wood roof. When I went in, there were a few people looking at what I realized was the organ.

But it didn't look like a typical organ. In the middle of the room here, there's a wooden structure with two kind of towers and then some metal pipes coming out of it. And they are making the sound. Those pipes are making the sound that's filling this room. One sound. And that's filling this room. One sound. And that's it. That's the performance. Well, at least until the chord change. At which point the organ will play a different one sound. Over the last 23 years, this tiny pipe organ playing this loud drone has drawn in thousands of fans, especially during chord changes.

And as unassuming and discordant as it is, it tends to keep people drawn in once they hear it. There are people who come for every change, often traveling from thousands of miles away. People who will stay in the church all day, just listening. People whom Oregon 2 ASLSP literally brings to tears. I came to Halberstadt to find out why. As in, why does Oregon 2 ASLSP even exist in the first place? And what is it that so mesmerizes people

about being in a cold, crumbling building listening to this? ["The Last Supper"] building, listening to this. The artist behind this very, very slow performance was John Cage. Cage was an American composer who started his career in the 1930s with well-received instrumental compositions like In a Landscape from 1948. Cage's compositions could be complex and modern, but they didn't always push boundaries. That changed in the 1950s, when he began experimenting not with the sound of music, but with the idea of music. His most famous piece is probably 4 minutes 33 seconds, during which the performer is

supposed to sit silent for 4 minutes and 33 seconds while the audience listens to whatever sounds are in the room, the air conditioner humming, other people shuffling uncomfortably, the traffic passing by outside. I love the activity of sound. Here he is talking about it in 1991. If you listen to Beethoven or to Mozart, you see that they're always the same. But if you listen to traffic, you see it's always different. You can read all sorts of meaning into Cage's work.

It's supposed to make us think about silence or randomness. Or maybe it's not really supposed to make us think much at all. In an interview, Cage quoted the philosopher Immanuel Kant. There are two things that don't have to mean anything. One is music and the other is laughter. Don't have to mean anything that is in order to give us very deep pleasure. In 1985, Cage experimented with time and wrote the first iteration of ASLSP with the explicit instruction to try to play it as slowly as possible.

Here's one of the early attempts. Now, if you're thinking that the letters ASLSP don't really correspond to the words as slow as possible, Cage is one step ahead of you. The title is also a reference to a line in James Joyce's novel Finnegan's Wake. The line is, Soft morning city, Lisp, where Lisp is just spelled L-S-P. What that has to do with the music isn't really clear. But as more musicians began to take an interest in ASLSP, very soon performers trying to follow Cage's instructions hit a wall. Cage wrote this first iteration to be performed on piano, but there's a physical limit to how long a note can sound on a piano. You press a key, a hammer strikes a string, but the string will eventually stop vibrating.

So the first performances of ASLSP lasted between 10 and 20 minutes, which is pretty long for a song. Just not, you know, long, long. Performers were stymied. They wanted a way to play ASLSP slower, much slower than was possible on a piano. But then, in 1987, Cage reworked the music for an instrument that didn't have any such limitations. That's Klaus Ad Heinrich playing. He's on the board of trustees for the project that brought Cage's ASLSP to Halberstadt. And he's director of music for the Halberstadt Cathedral, whose organ you're hearing. It's across town from the Cage project, and it's where I went to understand why the pipe organ

is the perfect instrument for a performance that needs to last a very long time. The cathedral's organ is on a big stone balcony that rises above the main floor. To get there, we went through a wooden door and up twisting stone stairs with uneven grooves that have worn in over the centuries. At the top, Clauzade and I were in a stone area lit by the moonlight coming in from a gigantic ornate window.

Oh wow. We're inside the organ here. Impressive sight. You can look down there. This was my first time being inside a working pipe organ, and my first thought was that the name organ fits. Like a bodily organ, a pipe organ is an intricate system. And this system is all about moving air. And only air. Which is also the reason an organ can play much, much longer notes than a piano. Its sound doesn't come from a vibrating string. It comes from airflow. The air is drawn from whatever space the organ happens to be in. In this case, it came from inside the cathedral itself.

Klaus Erhard showed me an opening with a screen over it. That's to prevent birds from going in and not coming out again. Sometimes they let them fall and then they are inside and they die. From the cathedral's interior, the air goes into the organ through the bellows. These are basically big pumps. In the old days, bellows had to be manually pushed, sometimes by people standing on them and working them like a big medieval stair master. But in modern organs, like the one I was climbing around in, the process

has been electrified. Klaus Erhardt went over to turn on a switch. Is that snow? I don't think so. They're rising. Yeah. From the bellows, we passed through another door into a room full of pipes standing in orderly rows. Then we went up a series of increasingly narrow ladders and stairs, climbing higher and higher into more rooms with more pipes. Some were wider than a bowling ball, while others were barely bigger than a pencil. The way the air from the bellows becomes music is by passing through these pipes. Every pipe

is tuned to a note, A, Bb, C sharp, and so on. But each pipe also has its own voice based on how it's made. It could be big and brassy, or thin and reedy. An organist decides which voices to use by opening or closing what are called stops. If the stop for the big brassy pipes is open, that's what the organ will sound like. And an organist doesn't need to choose only one stop. Multiple stops can be open all at once, so a single press of a key sends air through multiple pipes. This is where we get the phrase pulling out all the stops. I asked Klaus Ad if he could pull out all the stops for a single key.

Can you just walk me through one note as the stops open and what the sound is? Well, one stop after the other. Yeah, add each one. For instance, we're here. Or also different. And so different. And so on. And for instance I can couple. That's amazing. As long as there's an open stop, a pressed key, and a flow of air, an organ can play a note like this indefinitely.

So back in 1987, when Cage rewrote ASLSP specifically for the organ, his instruction to play it as slow as possible took on a whole new meaning. Cage died in 1992, but six years later, musicologists and philosophers met at a conference in Germany to determine what was the best way to play ASLSP really slowly on an organ, and how long could you possibly play it for? And they made something in Germany we called Brainstorm. Reiner Neugebauer is the chair of the board of trustees for the John Cage Organ Project.

He says the conference attendees had some very different opinions, like whether the organist playing ASLSP could or should stay at the organ. And one said, oh, the organist must go to the loo or eat something. Then one religious or theologian people say, no, no, the organist must play until he die, fell dead from the seat. So it was a lifetime of the organist.

Reiner says these ideas weren't quite right, because an organist can only play a piece for so long. But the music doesn't say a person has to be the one playing it. You need not all the time an organist. You can fix the keys. In other words, you could find a way to keep the keys depressed so there's always a flow of air. No organist needed. With this approach, the only theoretical limit would be the lifespan of the organ itself.

So when the organ breaks down, the music is over. Out of this debate came an idea to play a very long rendition of Organ 2 ASLSP on an organ made specifically for the performance. The philosophers, theologians, and musicologists also needed a place to host this indefinite concert and they landed on Halberstadt. Halberstadt was, in many ways, the perfect choice. Because it might not seem like it, but in the world of pipe organs, this rural German town of 40,000 people is kind of a big deal.

In restaurants and hotels, I kept seeing brochures that call Halberstadt, Orgelstadt, Oregon City. On the back, there was a map to eight different pipe organs around town. That's roughly one pipe organ for every 5,000 people. And the project's organizers knew about an old church in a nun's cloister called St. Bucardi that would be perfect for the performance. By 1998, the church wasn't in good shape. It had been used for just about everything but religious services since the early 19th century.

It was storage, a brewery, a barn for pigs. The city agreed to hand over the church to the project, but the performance was far from ready. We had the location and then we had to think about how long do we play. Anneli Borgman is another member of the board of the Cage Project, along with Klaus Aert and Heinrich, and she says that figuring out how long to play isn't as easy as saying, play until the organ falls apart. ASLSP is written as sheet music. It has a beginning and an end.

You have to have some kind of tempo if you're actually going to play it. So the foundation looked back into Halberstadt's history with organs. We have so many churches, and of course, so many organs, and also organ history. That history had begun in the 14th century and of course so many organs, and also organ history. That history had begun in the 14th century

with the installation of an organ in the town cathedral. And so someone suggested, hey, exactly how long ago did the town's cathedral get its old organ? Let's play the piece for that long. Which came out to 639 years. And so on John Cage's birthday, September 5th, 2001, Reiner and the other members of the Foundation

gathered in St. Bucardi and began their 639-year journey. With a rest. At the beginning, there were just the bellows because the piece starts with a break. And so you just heard for 17 months, just the bellows because the peace starts with a break. And so you just heard for 17 months just the bellows. The bellows for the cage organ are in the back of the church, in a wood structure about the size of a small car.

They have a backup motor that keeps them going, and they haven't ever stopped pumping air, even if that air doesn't go through any pipes and just vents out into the church. After that first day, if you went to see the performance, that's what you'd hear, just the sound of air moving through this contraption. You could say this was the soft-morning city Lisp referenced in the piece's title. It was all very Cajun. The organ's design was similarly notable for what's not there. There's no piano-style keyboard or switches

to open or close stops. The only controls are three small wooden keys on the front with tiny sandbags holding them down to keep the air moving through the pipes, which sit in a spare wooden frame. To make different notes, the foundation members replace the pipes, putting sit in a spare wooden frame. To make different notes, the foundation members replace the pipes, putting new ones into open slots and taking old ones out.

Certain upcoming sections of the composition may require more pipes than the organ can currently fit, but because this is as slow as possible, Annalee Borgman says the question isn't urgent. This is the question of people after us, because the first part is ending in 2072. So I am 100 years old then. And I think they will, I don't know, perhaps in 2060, they will discuss how to go further on. And it won't be the first time the piece has needed some adjustments. You might think that with only one note

to play every couple of years, what could possibly go wrong? Well, it turns out a lot. The first chord change was on the wrong date. Early on, a reporter did some calculations and realized the project had gotten the math wrong. He told Reiner that the 17 months of Bellows blasting at the beginning should have been

28 months if the piece was to truly last until 2640. The slowest possible performance was moving too fast. So now where can we catch the 11 months? Because we are Germans. And Germans had the idea when I made a work and when I end a work, it must be correct." The group postponed the next chord change to make up the time, and now the piece is back on schedule. But that wasn't the only problem when the project got going. The first chord to play after the 17 months of rest

was also too loud. And it was a very disharmonic tone. And it's, oh, what, what, what's, when you broke, oh, when the, when the car was broken, broken. Oh, car, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, so it sounded a little bit like this. And there was people who heard it and they go to the police and said, Yeah, yeah, so it sounded a little bit like this. And there was people who heard it and they go to the police and say, we can't sleep.

But you can't just turn a pipe organ down. The sound comes from air moving through pipes. There's no volume knob. So for almost 10 years, they had to put the organ underneath an ugly plexiglass box, which warped the sound. Then, in 2011, they brought in two new bass pipes. The new pipes, plus some adjustments to the bellows, made the organ quieter. Two neighbors I spoke with, Jakim and Margit Trube, say that today they can't hear the organ at all.

It's too quiet. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No, no, you can't hear that. I asked what they think of it, and Joachim said it doesn't really have a deep meaning to him. You have to be an artist or a music lover to understand it, he said. Which I guess he was not. No. No. No. But one thing Joachim does notice is that the organ brings in tourists.

The project is good, he says. The project is good. The morning of the court change, the Cloisters courtyard filled up a few hours before the big event. Uta Persie was sitting next to the church, sheltering from the wind. She'd come from Hamburg.

You're out in the cold, in the wind, waiting to get in? I got my coffee here, no problem. She was pretty dedicated. I take a day off holidays. You're on vacation? You took holiday from work? Yes. Some people made even more of a trip out of the chord change,

even if they didn't know much about experimental music. Like Albert Schia and Peter Z, who were on their first trip to Europe. Well, I came here from Victoria, BC. Wow. I'm from New York. And you flew in just for this? came here from Victoria, BC. Wow. Yeah. I'm from New York. And you flew in just for this?

Yeah. Kind of, yeah. That's a good excuse to, you know, come to Europe, but... It's the highlight. Yeah, it's the highlight. Are you big Cage fans? We have never heard anything about Cage. About 500 people showed up, and as the change approached, the church doors opened.

We packed inside the church, which was quite cold. Reiner and a few others walked in and gathered in front of the organ, next to a music stand displaying the score, with lines marking each month of the performance. Another board member began to speak. As the audience settled in, the speaker asked for a few minutes of silence. The next five minutes, we will few minutes of silence.

It was eerie. I was surrounded by hundreds of people, no one making a sound, as we just listened to the unchanging drone. Then, wearing white gloves, Reiner approached the organ carrying a new pipe, tuned to D natural. As he lowered it into an opening in the organ, we could hear the air start to move, and the entire organ adjust to the change. We stayed still for two more minutes, all of us surrounded by this new sound. — You're welcome. — Thank you. — Thank you. — Thank you. — Thank you.

— Thank you. — Thank you. — Thank you. — Thank you. — Thank you. — Thank you. — Thank you. — Thank you.

— Thank you. — Thank you. — Thank you. — Thank you. — Thank you. — Thank you. — Thank you. — Thank you.

— Thank you. — Thank you. — Thank you. — Thank you. — Thank you. — Thank you. — Thank you. to someone crying, it was Aletta Jekker with the Cage Project. She had handed Reiner the new pipe. My role was only to bring him the organ pipe so he could put it in. That was my part. How did it feel? Crazy. It was so emotional. It's only an organ pipe, but it's quite emotional actually. What gives it such weight? You know, you listen to this for about two years, and now you say goodbye to a sound.

Outside, it was kind of like a music festival. People were hanging out, sitting on the grass, and some were making plans to come for the next chord change, including Ettore Bartolini. And what did you think? No thoughts. No impression or anything? I think the matter is quite self-evident.

I met some scouts who had a tradition of hiking to Halberstadt for chord changes. Another group was making a documentary about the project that won't be done until the organ concert ends. They plan to pass the unfinished work from generation to generation for centuries. But even for the most devoted, there's only so much time you can spend with the organ. Reiner Neugebauer is 70. He's spent almost a third of his life with the concert. And he says it takes a lot of busy, frantic, not slow as possible activity

to keep as slow as possible going. Between giving tours, managing volunteers, raising money, promoting the performance, and just checking in on the organ, organ 2 ASLSP is actually a lot of work. Now, Reiner is thinking of stepping back, which to him means embracing the uncertainty of the project. Do you think it'll make it all 639 years? This is a very hard question. You must say we don't know it. Maybe in 500 years it's too hot here that no more people live here.

In the last 20 years, we have four times big holes in the roof from heavy storms. Maybe one of the dictators who have the nuclear power smash atom bomb. Maybe there are no people who are interested in it. I don't know. This is a serious answer. Currently, the biggest threat is funding. It costs about 60,000 euros a year to run the organ, plus all the hours of volunteers. There are plaques along the wall of the church where people have sponsored years of the performance,

and the foundation is planning to pre-sell tickets to the final performance, which will be passed down to future generations. The cost? 2,640 euros, as in the year the concert will end. And there are plans to host events and other projects at the Cloister to generate not only revenue, but more volunteers who will keep this going. One of those volunteers is Annalee Borgman, who joined the project four years ago. She's planning to get even more involved in the coming decades.

But it will get a really busy year. In 2034, we will have three chord changes, so we have really a hectic period then. Yeah, it'll be moving pretty fast at that point. Do you find humor in the project as well? Of course. I think it's really okay if somebody thinks that's a joke. For every person it's a different project. For me it's a serious project, but I can also smile about it. For example, I get a smile when I'm in the church.

For example, a bird is coming in the church. It's wonderful and it's also funny. And I kid you not, the Germans have a word for that feeling. In German you say verrückt, a crazy idea. And in German there's a double meaning. On one hand it's crazy and on the other hand it's moved. Moved. As in, to move something to the side. To set it off. To follow its own beat.

Even if that beat is extremely slow. After three days in Halberstadt, I went back to see the organ alone. All the earlier excitement around the chord change had been just a blip in the life of the performance. Now, as it is most of the time, the organ was just in the church by itself, with no crowds, no TV cameras, no tourists. I walked around the church, listening to the ways the pipes interact with each other and with the walls and floor. How the performance changed as I moved. It was more discordant in some places, more like one even tone in others. I went to the corner where Reiner recommended I stand. There's this open space here. The sound is really, you can hear

different overtones coming through. It doesn't sound especially like it's coming from the organ. It seems like it's almost coming out of the walls. I started to feel almost giddy, overwhelmed not just by the sound, but by the idea of the project going on for centuries in this same place. If all goes according to plan, it'll play long after I'm dead. It was haunting and unsettling, but then kind of peaceful. Then it was funny again. Verrückt. I'm looking at an organ playing a chord for two and a half years out of 639 years. for two and a half years out of 639 years. What am I doing here?

I don't know. I like knowing that it's here. Later, I thought back to that old archival interview with John Cage. When I talk about music, it finally comes to people's minds that I'm talking about sound that doesn't mean anything. And they say, you mean it's just sounds? Thinking that for something to just be a sound is to be useless. Whereas I love sounds just as they are. And I have no need for them to be anything more.

I just want it to be a sound. Music When we come back, we'll explore a different contribution Halberstadt has made to music history 663 years in the past. Stick around. So we're back with Gabe Bullard. And Gabe, you mentioned in the story that Halberstadt got a pipe organ in 1361, and apparently that organ has a more significant role in music history than just inspiring this very, very long organ concert. Yeah. So the records from the 14th century aren't exactly great, but historians have reason to think

that Halberstadt's organ played an important role in the creation of the standard Western piano keyboard that we're so familiar with today. Okay, interesting. Tell me a little bit more. I will, but first I wanna give you a sense of what pipe organs in the 14th century were like, because they were played a little differently

from the modern pipe organ. When I talked to Klaus Errd Heinrich, the music director at the Halberstadt Cathedral, he told me some of the old organs were really hard to play. And apologies because in this clip you'll see Claus-Erd's English and my German didn't quite meet in the middle. Okay, um, muddle through. You couldn't play fast. It was very heavy. What were they doing? How were they playing the original? You had to, in Latin, tractare,

to beat the horn, but it was very heavy. What was it that people were hitting? It wasn't like a key. No, it was, so a key. No, it was a bowl. A bowl. It was made of wood. Oh, like a hole? If you eat something, you have...

Oh, a plate? Something like that. A very great spoon. You have... Oh, a plate? Yeah, something like... Or a spoon or a bowl? Yeah, no, no, yeah. A very great spoon. Okay, okay. A very good spoon. And you could beat with a fist. And so to translate what Klaus Herd meant by a very great spoon was basically a bowl.

Okay, so if I'm understanding correctly, instead of keys, as we know them, there were like these hand-sized bowls that people hit down with their fists. Yeah, yeah, like they would hit them down and hold them down with their whole hand. I mean, given that limitation and the sort of strength to play the organ, I'm amazed organs caught on at all. Yeah, me too. But the big thing with these early organs is that whatever size the keys

were, they weren't laid out the same from organ to organ. How so? So if you picture what you would see today when you sit down at almost any piano or organ or synthesizer, you're almost certainly seeing your standard 12 keys. Seven white, five black. And that represents an octave. Right, and so when we talk about going up or down an octave, we're talking about doubling or halving the frequency of the sound. Like that part is just physics. That's always been true. And so the pattern of 12 keys representing one octave

just repeats as your hands move to higher or lower octaves on the keyboard. Correct, and these 12 keys on the keyboard are even reflected in the way we write music, using a scale with 12 half steps. A, A sharp, B, C, C sharp, all the way back to A, a full octave higher. 12 keys playing 12 tones. But the thing is, it's not actually necessary to divide the octave into 12 tones like this. And for much of Western history, we didn't. So what were the other ways that you could divide up an octave?

12 was just one of many. An instrument could have fewer notes per octave. It could have more notes. It could have notes that didn't go up by a half step. There are centuries of mathematicians dividing up the octave differently. And just to give you two quick examples, here's something called the Ancient Greek Inharmonic Scale, which was likely developed somewhere around 600 BCE.

And here's another ancient Greek scale. ["Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp"] Wow, and so what makes those scales sound so different? So with that first inharmonic scale, there are notes that are in between the notes on your standard piano keyboard. Like they would sit between the C and the C-sharp. And so your ear might not be used to them, but they've kind of been waiting around for us to listen to or to hear them for 2,500 years.

I mean, that's so cool. I love that, that 2,500 years ago, Western music could be built out of such different component parts and sounds so different from music of today. It's pretty cool. And that's how things were well through the Middle Ages. Musicians and instrument makers divided up the octaves using different scales.

But then in the year 1361, Halberstadt got its organ. Okay. I think I see where this is going. And I'm going to make you go there anyway, because I am now going to show you an old drawing that depicts what the keys on that first Halberstrasz organ looked like. Okay, so these are the really big and bulbous bowl paddles that you have to pound down with your fist.

But what's uncanny is that it really looks like a modern piano key layout. Like there's a big row of keys and smaller ones in between. You can totally see these are the white keys, these are the black keys. And for all intents and purposes, that looks like a present-day Western keyboard. Exactly, yeah, and it's believed this is the first example of a keyboard like this. Wow. And to be clear, records are very spotty. This

drawing is from more than 200 years later, and while people had divided the octave into 12 notes before, this is what a lot of writers say was the first big church organ to organize the keys this way. And it played a big role in the layout becoming the standard in Western music as more and more instruments were built like this, with just 12 tones. Huh. And that's why almost all classical music is built around those 12 notes. Yeah. And one thing Klaus Ehred told me too is that there was this kind of push and pull between

organ makers and musicians. Composers could push the limits of what an organ could do, but unless organ makers changed their instruments, then the music had to fit what could physically be played. Right. And I suppose when you think about the most familiar music notation too, all the staffs, the sharps, the flat cymbals, they're indicating those 12 notes. Exactly.

Now, it should be said that there are some good underlying reasons why the 12-note system eventually became the dominant format. Dividing an octave by 12 makes harmonies and chords a lot easier to find and play. But on the other hand, the big downside is that the dominance of 12 notes ended up limiting the kind of music that could be made. Halberstadt's keyboard was saying that

of all the notes inside an octave, you only have 12 to choose from. And so throughout the years, this has generated pushback. Yeah, I can imagine. So who pushed back and how did they push back? So that ancient Greek scale we heard earlier was from a 1958 documentary on the late music theorist and composer Harry Parch. And Parch was not a huge fan of the Halberstadt 12-tone limitation.

In a book in 1949, he coined a phrase that I heard a lot of people in Halberstadt say when I was reporting the story. The fatal day of Halberstadt. The fatal day of Halberstadt. Parch called it the fatal day of Halberstadt because it would eventually lead to that keyboard and then those tones being locked in for Western music

and the other potential scales and tones kind of fading away. And Parch wanted to recover those old tones. And so what does that mean? Like, did he just want to resurrect other scales that had fallen out of disuse, like the ancient Greek one, or did he want to create entirely new scales? Both. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

I like Harry Parch, okay. Yeah, he said we should question the ideas that physical instruments lock us into. So he built instruments that could play different intervals. And the math behind how to do this gets pretty strange, but he came up with a scale that had 43 notes. Here he is playing it on an instrument he made called a chromolodion.

Here is the scale on my chromolodion and adapted reed organ. That makes me feel incredibly tense. Oh my goodness. Very parched. Okay, but up to this point, we've been focusing just on Western music and I've heard plenty music from different cultures where 12 tones isn't the standard and hasn't always been the standard. Oh definitely. A lot of Middle Eastern music uses up to 24 tones, and in a lot of places outside the influence

of the halberstad organ, scales and instruments have historically been played differently. And I should say, we hear these in-between tones, sometimes called microtones, all the time now, even in Western music. I'm looking at a guitar here in the corner of my office, all the time now, even in Western music. I'm looking at a guitar here in the corner of my office, and the neck has frets that divide the octave into 12 notes, but you can bend strings, and that can make the blue note that makes the blues so distinct. And sometimes a singer like Mariah Carey might do a big vocal run in a pop song.

Or there's that opening bass slide in These Boots Are Made for Walkin'. Not everything fits that 12th note system, and people find ways around it. Well, Gabe, this has been so fascinating and fun. Thank you so much for sharing all this. Thank you, Roman. It's been a pleasure. 99% Ambizable was reported this week by Gay Bullard and edited by Joe Rosenberg with additional editing by Kelly Prime mixed by Martin Gonzalez, music by Swan Real, fact checking by Sona Avakian, And special thanks this week to Linda Golden. Cathy Tu is our executive producer, Kurt Kolstad is the digital director, Delaney Hall is our

senior editor, Nikita Apte is our intern. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Ley, Lash Madon, Gabriella Gladney, Kelly Prime, Jacob Maldonado-Medina, Nina Potok, and me Roman Mars. The 99% visible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building. In beautiful Uptown, Oakland, California.

You can find us on all the usual social media sites as well as our new Discord server. And if you want to find out more about Hubbershot's CAGE project or its accompanying 639 year long documentary, there are links to that as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org. you