As Slow As Possible
41:51 Share

this is 99 percent invisible im Romanmars 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 dirty you want to be there when the show starts in February， everyone who went to a concert and hover stock， Germany showed up 23 years late right， getting ready to head to the trainstation one of those late commerce was gave bullet gaves reporter living in bazzle Switzerland so he took the train a few hours into Germany to a pretty rural part of the country。

howverstart is an old medieval town like what youd expect from a storybook there are timberframehouses packed closetogether curving cobblestone states but there wasntimeforsightscene the concert was well underway and Gabe was planning to leave early because from this concert everyone walks out early its a performanceof a piece called organ to aslsp， aslsp stands for as slow as possible， which is how the composer meant for to be played， and thats how it is being played very slowly and the reason i came all the way to howbershotnow is because this was no ordinary day of the performance i came to see accordchange the last time organ 2ASLSP had accordchange was 2022 and this new cord will play until the next change in August of 2026 theres 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 six hundred and thirty nine years walking up to the concert looks like this is it gonna walk in， theperformancesinthechurchofunnonscloyster founded in the thirteenth century its an old building with bare stone walls a floor thats mostly gravel and a woodth when i went in there， were a few people looking at what i realized was the organ， but it didnt look like a typical organ in the middle of the room here theirs a wooden structure with two pending towers and then some metal pipes coming out of it and they are making the sound those pipes are making the sound thensfilling this room one sound and thats it thats the performance well at least until the core change at which point the organ will play a different one sound over the last 23 years this tiny piporgan playing this loud drone has dropped in thousands of fans especially during cord changes and is unassuming and discordent as it is it tends to keep people drawing in once they hear it there people who come for every change often travelling from thousands of miles away people who will stay in the church all day just listening peoplewhomorgen to aslsp literally brings to twers i came to helvers start to find out why as in why does organ to aslsp even exist in the first place and what is it that so mesmarizes people about being in a cold crumbling building to this？

the artist behind this very very slow performance was John cage， Cage was an American composer who started his career in the nineteen thirties withwellreceived instrumental compositions like in a landscape from 1948。

cagescompositions could be complex and modern， but they didnalways push boundaries that changed in the nineteen fifties when he began experimenting， not with the sound of music but with the idea of music。

hismsfamous peace is probably four minutes， 33 seconds during， which the performer is supposed to sit silentfor four minutes and 33 seconds all the audience listens to whatever soundsarein the room the air conditioner humming other people shuffling uncomfortably the traffic passing by outside。

i love the activity of sound here is talking about it in 191 if you listen to baitaven are two motes are you see that there are always the same but if you listen to traffic you see！

its always defing you can read all sorts of meaning into cageswork its supposed to make us think about silence or randomness， or maybe its not really supposed to make us think much at all in an interview cage quoted the philosopher a monial count there are two things that。

dont have to mean anything， one is music and the other is 侣， dont 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 herese one of the earlyattempts！

now if youthinking that the lettersasp dont really correspond to the words as low as possible， cages one step ahead of you the title is also a reference to align in James Joyce novel finagence wake thelineassoftmorningcity lispwherelistis just spelled lsp what that has to do with the music isnt really clear。

but is more musicians began to take an interest in aslsp very soon performers trying to follow cagez instructions hit a wall cage route this first iteration to be performed on pno， but theres a physical limit the howlonged unnoteconcerned on a piano you press a keya hammer strikes a string but the string will eventually stop vibrating so the first performancesofaslsp lasted between ten and twentyminutes， which is pretty longfora song just not you know longlong performers were stimed they wanted a way to play aslsp slower muchslower than was possible on a piano but then in 1987， cage reworkthemusic for instrument that didnt have any such limitations。

thats clousadhinert plane hes on the board of trustees for the project， the brout cagesasp to huberstop and hes director of music for the huberstock cathedral whos organyourhearing itsacrosstownfromthecage project and its where i went to understand why the pipeorgan is the perfect instrument for a performance that needs to last a very long time， the cathedrealsorgen 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 centre at the top clousaidand i were in a stone area lit by the moonlight coming in from a gigantic ornate window oh！

wow！

where can side be orgin here？

yeah！

impressive side yeah you can look down， yeah！

this was my first time being inside a workingpipeorgan， and my first thought was that the name organ fits like a bodily organ a pipeorgan 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 sounddoesntcomefromavibrating string it comes from airflow the air is strongfromwhateverspacetheorgan happens to be in inthiscaseit came from inside the cathedral itself class airheart showed me an opening with the screen over it thats to prevent but from going in and not coming out again sometimes they they let some fall and then they are in inside and 没答应 from the cathegials interior there 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 stairmaster but in modern organs like the one i was climbing around in the process has been electrified pouse airheart went over to turn on a switch now do you see？

thats no？

therizing 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 bolingball。

while others were barely bigger than a pencil the way the air from the bellowes becomes music is by passing through these pipes every pipe is tuned to a note， a， b flat， c sharp and so on， but each pipe also has its own voice based on how its made it could be big and brassy or thin and ready anorganistides？

which is to use by opening or closing what are called stops？

if the stop for the big？

brassy pipes is open thats what the organmalsoundlike ananorganist doesnt need to choose only one stop multiplestops can be open all at once so asinglepress of a key sensaror through multiplepipes this is where we get the phrase pulling out all the stops？

i asked if he could pull out all the stops for a single key can you just walk me through one note as the stops open what the surface will once stop after the other？

yeah！

i had each one for instance ring？

what was so a different， and so on and for instance i can copylow？

its amazing yeah as long as there is an open stop， a press key and a flower an organ can play a note like this indefinally soback in 1987。

whencagereroteaslsp specifically for the organ his instructionto playit as slow as possible took on a whole new meaning cagedied in 1992。

but 6 years later musically just send philosophers met at a conference in Germany to determines what was the best way to play？

aslsp really slowly on an organ and how long could you possibly play it for then they made a something in in Germany record brainstone Rhinor Noiga Bower is the chair of the board of trustees for the John Cage organ project hesaystheconferenceattendshadsomeverydifferent opinions like whether the organist playing aslsp could or should stay at the organ and one said oh！

the the organist must go to the blue or eat something up then one， one， one religious er they are loching people say no no， the organist must play until he die fell die the dead from the cts so the itwasa lifetime of a ofa the organist rhinar says these ideas werent quite right because an organist can only play a piece for so long！

but the music doesnt say a person has to be the one playing it you need a a 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 theres always a flow of air no organist needed with this approach the only theoretical limit would be the lifespan of the organ itself。

so then the organ breaks down the music is over。

addthisdebate kemanidea to play a very long rendition of organ to aslsp on an organ made specifically for the performance， the philosophers， the logons and musicologies also needed a place to host this indefinite concert and they lint it on huberstop huberstotwasinminewaystheperfect choice because it might not seem like it but in the world of pipeorgans。

this worldgerman town of 40 people is kind of a big deal inrestauncenhotelsicapseingbrosuresthecallhobberstoorgalstoorgancity ontheback， there is a map to 8 different pipeorgans around town besroughly 1 pipeorgan for every 5000 people and the projects organizors knew about an old church in a nonscuistercalled Saint boocardi that would be perfect for the performance by 998 the church wasndingoodshape， it had been used for just about everything but religious services since the early nineth centry it was storage a brewery a barn for pigs thecity agreed to hand over the church to the project but the performancewasfar from ready we had the location and then we had to think about um how long do we play honey borgmen is another member of the board of the cage project along with clousiad in hinrick， and she says that figuring out how long to play isnt as easy as saying by 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 youre actually going to play it， so the foundation looked back and a hover starts history with organs we have so many churches and of course， so many organs and also organ history that history had begun in the fourteenth sentry with the installation of an organ in the towncathedral and so someonesuggested hey， exactly how long ago did the townscathedral get its old organ lets play the peace for that long， which came out to 639 years and so on John Cagesbirthday September 5201， rhiner and theother members of the foundation gathered in saint Boocardi and began there 639 yearjourney。

with a rest at the beginning they were just the bellows because the piece starts with a break yeah and so you just heard for 13 month just the bells！

the bellows for the cage organ are in the back of the church in a woodstructure about the size of a small car they have a backup motor that keeps them going and they havent ever stopped pumping air even if that air doesngo any pipes and just Vince out into the church after that first day if you want to see the performance thats what youd here， just the sound of air moving through this contraption you could say this was the soft morningcity list referenced in the pieces title it was all very cajian theorgansdesign was similarlynotableforwhatsnotthere theresnopianostylekeyboard orswitches toopenorclosestops theonlycontrols are threesmallwoodenkeys on the front with tiny sandbags holding them down to keep the air moving through the pipes which setinaspare wooden frame to make different notes the foundation members replace the pipes putting new ones into openslots and taking old ones out certain upcoming sections of the composition may require more pipes than the organ concurrently fit。

but because this is as low as possible and only borgmen says the question is an urgent this is the question of people after us because the first part is ending in two thousand two so i am hundrey years old then and i think they will i dont know perhaps in 26 they will discuss how to go further on and it wont be the first time the peace has needed some adjustments you might think that with only one note to play every couple years what could possibly go wrong？

well？

it turns out a lot the the first the first carchange was on the rr wrong date early on a reporter did some calculations and realized the project had gotten the mathron hetoldrinerthatthe 17 monthsofbellos blastingat the beginning should have been 28 months if the peace was to truly last until 2640？

the slowest possible performancewasmovingtofast so now where can we catch the eleven month？

so because we are Germans yeah and Germans at the idea when i made a work and when i end of work？

it must be core the group postpone the next cord change to make up the time and now the pieces back on schedule but that wasnt the only problem when the project got going the first core to play after the 17 months of rest。

was also too loud and as was a very this hammonic tone and its oh what what s when when you broke out when the when a car was broken yeah， said yeah yeah， so its is it sounded a little bit like this and there was people who heard it and they going to the police and said we cant sleep but you cant just turn a pipeorgan down the soundcomes from air moving through pipes theres no volume knob so for almost ten years they had to put the organ underneath an ugly plexiclass box。

which warped the sound then in 21 theybrought in 2 new basepipes the new pipes plus some adjustments to the bellows made the organ quiet or two neighbors i spoke with Yachi and margetchuba say that today they cant hear the organ at all its too quiet nine！

nine， nine！

the sales manage nine！

i asked what they think of it and yacheme said it doesnt really have a deep meaning to him， understand it， he said， which i guess he was not nine。

but one thing your game does notice is that the organ brings and tourists the project is good！

he says doesgood the morning of the cord changed the cloisterous courtyard filled up a few hours before the big event utopercy was sitting next to the church sheltering from the wind should come from hombre youre out in the cold in the wind uh waiting for the to get end you get my coffee here no problem i i you see is pretty dedicated i i take i day your folly days youre on vacation you took a day for work yes， some people made even more of a trip out of the cord change， even if they didnknow much about experimental music like Albert， cia and Peterz who were on their first trip to Europe well！

i i came here from Fetori bc oh， wow， yeah im from New York man any fluent just for this yeah kind of yeah this is a good excuse to you know come to Europe but but the highlight yeah this the highlight are you big cache fans we have never heard anything about five hundred people showed up and as the change approach the church stores opened！

we packed inside the church， which was quite cold rhiner and a few others walk dan and gathered in front of the organ next to a musicstand displaying the score withlines marking each month of the performance anotherboard member began to speak as the audience settled in the speaker ask for a few minutes of silence。

please requiet just relax and this service！

it was eary i was surrounded by hundreds of people no onemakingasound as we just listened to the unchanging drone， then wearing white gloves rhinar approach the organ carrying a new pipe tune to d natural as he lowerded into an opening in the organ， we could hear the air start to move and the entire organ adjustto the change， we stayed still for two more minutes all of us surrounded by this new sound， then jubilation， after the applies the crowd broke up and people walked around the church a lot of them worked their way up to the road barrier around the organ looking on with reverence and big smiles i noticed someone crying it was a letty yecher with the cage project she had handed rhiner the new pipe my everyone was only to bring him and the oegan pipe so he could put a day and excited what that was my part in it？

how did it feel a crazy？

i think was so emotional yeah its only an organ five but this quite emotional actually， yeah what？

what？

what gives it such right um you know you listen to this for about two years and now you 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 cord change including edtoray， bartolini and what you think no thoughts， no no impression anything are i think the mother is quite um self evident i met some scouts who had a tradition of hiking the halber start for cord changes anothergroup was making a documentary about the project that wont be done until the organ concert ends they planned a passtheunfinished work from generation to generation for centuries。

but even for the most devoted theres only so much time you can spend with the organ rhinar nogabower is 70 hespent almost a third of his life with the concert and he says it takes a lot of busyfrantic notslowless possible activity to keep as slow as possible going betweengiving touors。

managing volunteers， raising moneypromoting the performanceanjust checking in on the organ organ to aslsp is actually a lot of work now rhinaris thinking of stepping back which to him means embracing the uncertainty of the project do you think itll make it all 639 years？

this is a very hard question you must say we dont know it maybe in five hundred years its too hot here those that no more people live here in the last twenty years， we have a four times big host in the rule from heavy storm maybe one of the dictators who have the nuclear power special atone bong maybe there are no people who are interested in it i dont know this is a serious answer currently the biggest threat is funding it costs about 60 Euros a year to run the organ plus all the hours of volunteers there are plax along the wall the church were people have sponsored years of the performance and a foundation is planning to presell tickets to the final performance。

which we pass down to future generations the cost 2640 as in the year the concert will end and there are plans to host events another projects at the closester to generate not only revenue。

but more volunteers will keep this going one of those volunteers is analyborgmen who joined the project four years ago， shes planning to get even more involved in the coming decades。

but it will get a really busy year in 2034， we will have three core change so we have really a a hectic， hectic， a period then yeah， yeah， it will be moving pretty fast at that point it really have it do you find you were in the project？

as well。

of course， i think its really okay have somebody think thats thats a choke for for every person， its a different project so yeah from yet to serious project， but i can also smile about it for expect i， i i get a smile at when i am in the church and for example， bird is coming in the church。

its wonderful and its also funny and i kidyou not the germents have a word for that feeling in German。

you say fair hook to a crazy idea and in John theres a double meaning its on one hand its crazy and on the other hand its um moved asintomovesomethingtothesidetosettoff tofollowitzonebeat evenifthatbeatisextremely slow。

after three days in halberstop， i went back to see the organ alone all the earlier excitement around the cord 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 walk around the church， listening to the ways， the pipes interact with each other and withthe walls and floor how the performance changed is i moved it was more discordant in some places， more like one even tone anothers i went to the corner where rhiner recommended i stand theres this open space here the sound is really you can hear different overtones coming through， it doesnt sound， especially like its coming from the organ it seems like its 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， itll play long after im dead， it was haunting and unsettling， but then kind of peaceful， then it was funny again forrocked im looking at an organ playing a gold for two and a half years i heard of 639 years what are my doing here？

i dont know i， i like knowing that its here。

later i thought back to that old archival interview with John cage uh when i uh talk about music， it finally comes two peoples minds that im talking about sound there doesnt mean anything， and they say you mean its just sounds thinking that to forsomething to just be a sound is that to be useless whereas i love sounds just as they are and i have no need for them to be anything more？

i just run it to be a sound。

whenwecomebackwalks for a different contribution hover stott has made to music history 663 yearns in the past stickground， so were back with Gabe bullet and Gabe you mentioned in the story that hover stock got a pipe organ in thirteen sixty one and apparently that organ has a more significant role in music history than just inspiring this very very long organ concert e yeah！

i so the records from the fourteenth century arent exactly great， but historians have reason to think that hoverstuds organ played an important role in the creation of the standard western piano keyboard that were so familiar with today！

okay， interesting tell me a little bit more i i will！

but first， i want to give you a sense of what pipeorgans in the fourteentsentry were like because they were played a little differently from the modern pipeorgan when i talk to clousaiedhinric， the music director the hobberstock a thedrill he told me some of the old organs were really hard to play and apologies because in this clip， youll see clousards English and my German didnt quite meet in the middle OK！

oh！

model through you couldn play fast huh a a it was very heavy uh a what what what were they doing how were how were they playing there you you had to in in Latin track target to beat the awn but it it it was very heavy what what was it？

the people were hitting it wasnlike a key no what it it it was a season， something you you have a plate yeah something like yeah no， no yeah very great spoon OK， OK！

very good spoon would and and and you couldbeat was a fist and so to translate what cloud meant by a very great spoon was basically a boll OK！

so im understanding correctly and set of keys as we know them they were like these hand sized boss that people hit down with their fists yeah yeah like they would hit em down and hold them down with their whole whole hand i mean given that limitation and this restrict to to play the organ im amazed organs cut on at all yeah！

me too uh but the big thing with these earlyorgans is that whatever size the keys were they wert laid out the same from organ to organ houseo so if you picture what you would see today when you sit down at almost any piano or organ or synthesizer， youre almost certainly seeing your standard twelvekeys seven white， five black and that represents an active right and so when we talk about going。

upper down， an active were talking about doubling or halfing the frequency of the sound like that part is just physics thats always been true and and so the pattern of twelve keys representing one active just repeats as your hands move to hire a lower octives on the keyboard correct and these twelvekeys on the keyboard are even reflected in the way we writemusic using a scale with twelve halfsteps！

AA sharp， BCC sharp allthewayback to a full octofier twelvekeys playing twelvetomes， but the thing is its not actually necessary to divide the active into twelvetowns like this and for mutuvewestern history， we didnt so what were the other ways that you could divide up an active twelvewas just one of many an instrument could have fewer notes peroctive it could have more notes it could have notes the didngo up by a halfstep there are centuries of mathematicians dividing up the active differently and just to give you two quick examples heresomething called the ancient Greek inharmonic scale， which was likely developed somewhere around 6BCE， and heres another engine Greek scale？

wow！

in into what makes those scales sound so different so with that firstinharmonic scale there are notes that are in between the notes on your standard piano keyboard like they would sit between the sea in the c sharp and so your ear might not be used to em， but theyve kind of been wading around for us to listen to or to hear them for 25 hundred years。

i mean thats so cool i love that that twenty five hundred years ago westermusic could be built out of such different component parts and sound so different from music of today its pretty cool and thats how things were well during the middle ages。

musicians and instrumentmakers divided up the actives using different scales but then in the year thirteen 61 halbershstart got its organ OK i think i see where this is going and and im going to make you go there anyway， because i am now going to show you an old drawing that depicks what the keys on that first organ look like OK？

so these are the really big and ballbest ballpadls that you have to pounddown with your fist and but whats on canny is that it really looks like a modern piano key layout like theres， a big role of keys and smaller ones in between you can totally see these the white keys， these the black keys and for all intention purposes that looks like a presentday western keyboard exactly yeah and its believethis is the first example of a keyboard like this！

wow and to be clear records are very spotty this drawing is for more than two hundred years later and while people had divided the active inthe twelve 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 layoutbecoming the standard inwestered music as more and more instruments were built like this with just and thats why almost all classical music is built around those twelfnotes yeah and one thingclousared told me two is that there was this kind of push and pull between organmakers and musicians composers could push the limits of what an organ could do but unless organ makers change their instruments than the music had to fit what could physically be played right and i suppose when you think about the most familiar music notation to all that the staffs。

the sharks， the flight symbols， theyre indicating those twelve notes exactly it now！

it should be said that there are some good underlying reasons why the twelvenotesystem eventually became the dominant format dividing an active by twelvemakes， harmonies， and coards a lot easier to find and play， but on the other hand， the big downside is that the dominance of twelve notes ended up limiting the kind of music that could be made a hover shots keyboard was saying that of all the notes inside an active youonly have twelve to choose from and so throughout the years this is generated pushback yeah， i can imagine so who push back and how did they push back so that ancient Greek scale we heard earlier was from a nineteen fifty eight documentary on the late music fierest and composer Harry Parch and parch was not a huge fan of the hobberstop limitation in a book in 149， he coined a phrase that i heard， a lot of people in halberestoutsay when i was reporting the story， the fatal day of hiber start the fastles day of hiber start to parch called it the fatal day of Harbor start because it would eventually lead to that keyboard and then those tons being locked in for western music and the other potential scales and tones kind of fading away and part wanted to recover those old towns and so what is that mean like did he just want a resurrect other scales that are falling out of this uselike the entrant Greek one or did he want to create entirely new scales both i like carry forch OK？

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 odan instrument he made called a chromodian here is the scale on my chromalodian anadapted read argon？

membmakes we feel incredibly tense， oh， my goodness very parch OK， but after this point， weve been focusing just on westermusic and ill hurt plenty music from different cultures where twelve isnt the standard and hasnalways been the standard oh！

definitely a lot of middle easternmusic uses up to 24 tones and in a lot of places outside the influence of the huberscode， organ scales and instruments have historically been played differently and i should say we hear these in between tones sometimes called micro tones all the time now even in western music im looking at a guitar here in the corner my office and the nec has frets that divide the active into but you can bend strings and that can make the bluenote that makes the blues so distinct， and sometimes a singer like Mario karry might do a big vocal run in a pop song， or theres that opening base slide in these boots are made for walking not everything fits that twelve note system and people find ways around it。

well gave up this is been so fastname and fun uh thank you so much for sharing office thank you roman its been a pleasure， 99 percent busbot was reported this week by gay bullet and edited by Joe Rosenberg， with additional， editing by Kelly prime， mixed by Martin Gonzales， music by Swan Rio， faq checking by Sona Avacian and special thanks this week to lend a golden caddy two is our executeproducer curt colstead is the disual direction to lany hall is our senior editor Nakita update is our intern thereisateme includes CRISPR Ruby， Jason Dalione， emofitscurl， Chris for Johnson， Vivian Lee， Lash Madonn Gabriel， a Gladmy， Kelly prime， Jacob Multonana， Madina Nina Potec and me Roman Mars the nine Numbson visible logo was created by Stuffin Lawrence we are part of the Stitcher and serious exam 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 science， as well as our new discord server and if you want to find out more about hover shots， cage project or its a company 639 yearlongdocumentary there are links to that as well as every passed episode of nine nine pi at nine pi dot org。