I heard that one night after a performance in college, John Cage returned to his room, where his roommate heard him laughing, “I did it! I fooled them again!”
What a character.
Organ playing 639-year-long piece changes chord
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Re: Organ playing 639-year-long piece changes chord
#12Its fascinating how the interest and energy around a project like this manages to be self-reinforcing. The idea on the face of it is quite nonsensical: building a machine to make continuous droning sounds for years at a time. How likely is it that the song actually would play to completion? The fascination is that it is not impossible that the effort will succeed, and its already gone far enough to be quite amazing in the attempt. And in the process its achieved a completely new way to experience music. That last part is both shallow (its a pretty boring way to experience music, and its hard to call it music at that time scale) and deep (with this performance, a chord change is opportunity for ceremony and news releases: its an event!).
Re: Organ playing 639-year-long piece changes chord
#13> While the composition officially started in 2001 - it began with 18 months of silence, and the first notes only rang out in 2003.
That's one way to launch an MVP!
Re: Organ playing 639-year-long piece changes chord
#14One quip: this piece is not "as slow as possible". One could write a piece of "music" that is one note to be played at the heat death of the universe, or a piece that is silence forever. It's fun to play with the definition of "music" like John Cage did his whole career, but the title of his piece is technically incorrect, the worst kind of incorrect.
It does depend on the definition of "music". A constant tone of infinite duration might not be considered music to all. In my opinion (just rendered now), music must have 20 BPM < tempo < 1000 BPM.
Re: Organ playing 639-year-long piece changes chord
#15"Some people reportedly booked tickets years in advance to experience Monday's chord change"
Clearly they're attention seekers—their rustling about in seats or asleep and snoring from boredom would be far more entertaining than the actual performance.
One has to wonder what kind of people are drawn to a musical event where if it were compared with say Bach's Passacaglia and Fugue BWV 582 then the latter's performance would be seen as a prestissimo running at relativistic speeds. Perhaps social scientists have insights into such strange behavior.
Of course, it's those who've booked tickets who are the center of attention here, such antics have always been expected of Cage.
Re: Organ playing 639-year-long piece changes chord
#16That piece's name? Slow Ass Debussy
Re: Organ playing 639-year-long piece changes chord
#17It isn't 639 years but.. Radiohead - Pyramid Song 800% slower (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiKWfcy-Z70)
Re: Organ playing 639-year-long piece changes chord
#18Fastest organ piece ever...
https://youtu.be/yypr7J4any0
53 seconds !
Re: Organ playing 639-year-long piece changes chord
#19That was a the catchiest part so far but I am waiting for the Marshmello remix, which he’s releasing promptly on the 2640 Ryan Seacrest New Year’s show
I wonder how Seacrest feels about already being "the old guy who has hosted New Year's since forever".
Pretty sure he's a robot or a clone. Cause he took New Year's Eve from Dick Clark, American Top 40 from Casey Kasem, American Idol, and now he's taking over the Wheel from Pat Sajak. Although he did give up ABC's Live with whomever.
Re: Organ playing 639-year-long piece changes chord
#20Its fascinating how the interest and energy around a project like this manages to be self-reinforcing. The idea on the face of it is quite nonsensical: building a machine to make continuous droning sounds for years at a time. How likely is it that the song actually would play to completion? The fascination is that it is not impossible that the effort will succeed, and its already gone far enough to be quite amazing i…
The human capacity to stretch credulity never ceases to amaze me.