Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: John Cage's 639 Year Concert

Episode Date: March 15, 2023

John Cage was a unique artist to say the least. Learn all about this avant-garde composer today.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi, I'm Rosie O'Donnell, and I've got a new podcast called Onward with me, Rosie O'Donnell, on iHeart. Mostly this part of my life is just about moving forward, and I thought, what a wonderful way to do it with good friends across a tiny table and just have a heartfelt conversation. Listen to Onward with Rosie O'Donnell, a proud part of the outspoken podcast network on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck in this short stuff. Jerry's here too. Dave's here in spirit and short stuff. That's right. Shout out to our old friends at housestuffworks.com, and in particular, Michelle Konstantinovsky, great name. Yeah.

Yeah. For this piece on the 639-year-long concert from a very, no longer with us, he died in 1992, but a very avant-garde, to say the least, composer that you've probably heard of named John Cage. Yeah, John Cage, I knew his name sounded familiar, but I couldn't quite place it until I ran across his piece or mention of his piece 433. Four minutes and 33 seconds, and that in and of itself made John Cage famous, even to people like me who aren't into avant-garde 20th century American composing. You should say what it is, because it really explains everything we need to explain about John Cage. So 433 is a composition that's just four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. There's no instruments playing a single note whatsoever. If you came out on stage and

did 433 at a piano, you'd just sit there for four minutes and 33 seconds. Have you watched it performed? I haven't. I'll bet it is really uncomfortable in a lot of ways. Well, it's interesting. It's performance art in a way, because like you said, it's not like you can just sit in a room and say that's your show. It's to be performed. The German Philharmonic on YouTube says this is 433, the conductor gets up there, raises his hands, and then no one does anything. He goes into the second movement, indicates that with a hand movement, then goes into the third movement, and no one does anything. And everyone bursts out into applause at the end, and you can't help but just sort of snicker a little bit.

The thing is though, if you're like, I hate John Cage more than I've ever hated anybody, just from hearing that. That's just so stupid. Just stop. You need to hear from a John Cage interpreter slash enthusiast named Reneer O. Nugebauer. And I think How Stuff Works interviewed Nugebauer for this article. And Nugebauer explains like 433 is not just some goofy performance piece. Like John Cage created that because to him, that's not silence. There's no intentional sounds being made, but there's plenty of sounds going on around you. And this is four minutes and 33 seconds of hearing completely unpredictable, unplanned sounds in the environment around you while this composition is going on. And when you hear that,

it's kind of like that moment when the psychedelics kick in on Homer in that chili pepper episode. He's like, whoa, that's what happened to me at least. And I suddenly am like, I like John Cage a lot. He's very neat. And it just keeps going from there really. Yeah. Or in the case of the performance in Germany that I watch, you would hear. Right. That counts. Are you in here? Was ist das? Was ist das? What does that mean? Means what is that? Oh, okay. And he also had another quote about him that I think kind of sums it up to, which is what we call silence for Cage means only the absence of intended sounds.

Right. So that was his jam. And that leads us to the 639 year long concert otherwise known as organ squared slash ASL SP, which stands for as slow as possible. And if you're like, wait a minute, just trust us, it stands for as slow as possible. Yeah. So maybe let's take a break there and we'll explain all this gobbity cook. What's up, y'all? This is Questlove and, you know, at QLS, I get to hang out with my friends. Sugar Steve, Laia, Vontigolo, Unpaid Bill. And we, you know, at Questlove Supreme, like the nerd out and do deep dives with musicians and actors and politicians and journalists. We give you the stories behind all your favorite artists and creatives that you have never heard. I'm talking about stories behind their life journeys and their works of art.

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favorite shows. So getting to as slow as possible, ASLSP, that wasn't the original name for it. I don't know that there was an actual name for it, I think in 1985 when you first composed it, right? It was XYZ PDQ. So I think it was in 1987, two years after he first composed it, he was like, we're going to call this as slow as possible. And that became not just the title for this piece, but the actual purpose of the piece. So it was to take this eight sheets of music that he composed that was ASLSP and play it as slowly as you could. And it was very John Cage from what I understand to be like, I'm not going to tell you how slow to do it, figure out what that means

to you, the artist, you interpret it however you want. The point is just play it as slow as you can. And that is one of his, I think one of his more famous works as well too. Yeah. And this was, I listened to a like 18 minute version today. It is an organ piece, obviously it's called organ squared and organ is key because you're not, you can't count on someone to blow into a saxophone for 30 minutes or three hours or 639 years, but an organ as it makes a constant consistent sound. And if you play this thing over 18 minutes or whatever, you will hear chord changes and you will hear something, but it's still like people like Brian Eno come around and I get the feeling John Cage is like, here hold my absence of beer, my invisible beer,

because you think you're doing something artsy and weird, get a load of this. I would think that probably John Cage is one of Brian Eno's gods. Yeah, I think they were buddies obviously. So to kind of explain this ASLSP, if you had the notes, da, da, da, da, da, right? And you played them normally like that for ASLSP that first might last a minute and a half and then the next one might last five minutes. The next, and then like you said, there's chord changes, but they're just not close together. So it's like taking a compressed like normal song and spreading it out, but you're doing

this in a live performance. So it's really cool. And that's the basis of it. But there was an interpretation that came along of it that we're talking about today that wasn't actually created by John Cage, but it is the most John Cage idea that wasn't created by John Cage. It's one of the greatest homages I've ever heard to anybody. Yeah, I mean, if there's an avant-garde music heaven, John Cage is still smiling at the idea that someone took his as slow as possible thing and really ran with it. And this was at the idea was sort of born, it sounds like, at a organ symposium in 1998 when people were kind of saying like, well, again, it's an organ piece. We can go as slow as we want with this thing because you can make that sound forever if you've

got, you know, can of beans to sit on a key. And it's not like a piano string or a guitar string or a woodwind that'll eventually fade away even with the most sustain. So like, where can we take this thing? Like, how far into the future can we take it? How long can we make it? How far can we take it? How long can we make it? There should have been lyrics to this. And they said, well, how about this? There was this cathedral called Halberstadt's Cathedral that was kind of where the organ was born and like the modern design for what we know as a keyboard took place. And they said, what a perfect place to do this thing. And I will let you explain why it's 639 years because that is super kind of fun and John Cage would love it.

That's very generous of you, Chuck. Thank you. Sure. I will do that. So the reason it was the perfect place was because that first keyboard was created in 1361. And this organ symposium, I guess, was happening around 2000. And they decided that what they would do is use the millennium as a fulcrum between past and future. That's a good way to put it. Yeah. And so they said, well, 1361 all the way to 2000 is 639 years. So what we're going to do is honor both John Cage and the creation of the modern keyboard back in 1361 by putting on a performance in Halberstadt where the organ was first created, or the modern one was, of ASLSP that will last 639 years. Pretty great. And again, I'm sure John Cage out there in the ether is just loving this.

Just a couple of years ago in September of 2020, they were like, it's time to change the chord. And that's, I don't know, do you know if they have a set? Did they literally divide it out? Yeah. Okay. So it's at an exactly timed interval between this one and the last one? Yeah. Under normal circumstances, if you were playing ASLSP, you'd just play it as slow as you wanted to. But because now they're trying to contain it within a certain time, they would have had to have calculated ahead of time. So they did the math to make it even Steven, I guess. And the chord change came up, came due on September 5th, 2020. And a bunch of people, there's a couple of videos of it,

one which is the real thing, another, I don't know if you saw this one, but it had the whole ceremony leading up to it. And right when it got to the chord change, it went to a metal song. Oh, really? Like they overdubbed it? Yeah, I got to see that one. It was very surprising. So yeah, so if you were in this, if you visit this church in Halberstadt, you're just going to, there's an organ there that's playing a single note and has been playing it for maybe years. And actually, Chuck, I saw that the most recent chord change was February 5th, 2022. So just over a year ago.

So there's been a more recent one. Okay. Yeah. So the first one, I think seven years before that, and then two years after that, I'm not sure when the next chord changes, but I'm sure you could find out. I couldn't find out, but maybe you can. Oh, so it's not at a regular interval then? No. So no, I'm sorry, it's not. So they basically are playing it. Yeah, they, yes, it's not a regular interval. It's, they figured out like this note should last, this long, this note should last that long. Oh, okay. I got you. So that the whole piece ends in 2640, 639 years after it started.

Okay. Wow. Amazing. It is amazing. Doesn't that make it even more amazing that it's not at regular intervals? Yeah, I figured it was like, you know, every 103 years will change the chord or whatever. Yeah, no, I'm sorry, I didn't catch that, but that's, so you can go to this, this church in Halverstot and visit this organ that's right now, as we speak, playing a single note and we'll be playing that note for probably years to come until the next chord change. I wonder if the interval was based on the original squashed composition. Like, I wonder if there was an interval that Cage had, in other words.

Yeah, I wonder too. All right, I'll have to look that up. But it's pretty cool. So one person put it that the work is no longer on a human time scale, and it can't be played by a single person any longer, which is really cool because they say, like, they liken it to building monuments and cathedrals that those things took hundreds of years in some cases and no one single person or group of people built them, generations did, and that's what's going to happen with this, this composition being played. Amazing. I think so too.

It's good stuff. Good pick, Chuck. This is one of the coolest How Stuff Works articles I've ever run across, so thank you for it. If you want to know more about it, go check it out on How Stuff Works, John Cage in the 630-year-long concert, and then also check out Universes in Universe. They have a little article on it, which is pretty informative. And since I said it's pretty informative, everybody, and Chuck said, yeah, that means short stuff's out. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio.

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