John Cage recital set to last 639 years recently witnessed a chord change
214 comments
·March 31, 2025_petronius
TheCondor
I'm not disagreeing with you, but you should invert the question and think about it.
In the case of a cathedral, I think it is relatively easy to commit to the project you won't see through, it has a significance to those people making the commitment. What becomes much more challenging is when future generations don't have the same level of commitment, it's a much bigger ask to stop. Maybe there is a better use of the resources that could impact people immediately; if it's a church, I'm thinking feeding the hungry and clothing the naked sorts of things. It's hard to stop something that "we've just been doing." It's also hard to ask "why are we doing this?"
In 200 years, suppose there is some crisis we cannot predict and the recital is to be interrupted or stopped. There will be an incredible amount of pressure on somebody to make a good choice. Pressure that was created by a distant ancestor, of sorts. That might be part of the beauty of it, that might be part of the bond that ties different people together throughout time and it might be wonderful. What if there is a caretaker that is ready to retire and cannot find the next caretaker? That seems like a horrible position to be in.
Japan is or was doing multi-generational mortgages a while back (I assume they might still be.) as it was the only way a family could afford to buy a property. I can see that being a tremendously loving act for your children or grandchildren in providing a property that they will own, but I could just as well see it being a gigantic burden to them, what if they want to live somewhere else? Them following their bliss effectively changes the living and working future of the parents.
lmm
> In 200 years, suppose there is some crisis we cannot predict and the recital is to be interrupted or stopped. There will be an incredible amount of pressure on somebody to make a good choice. Pressure that was created by a distant ancestor, of sorts. That might be part of the beauty of it, that might be part of the bond that ties different people together throughout time and it might be wonderful. What if there is a caretaker that is ready to retire and cannot find the next caretaker? That seems like a horrible position to be in.
We have plenty of examples where this has already happened. Traditions that were maintained at significant cost in the face of difficulties or opposition. Caretakers of something ancient who struggle to find an heir. We tend to view them positively.
> Japan is or was doing multi-generational mortgages a while back (I assume they might still be.) as it was the only way a family could afford to buy a property.
I suspect this has been misreported. Japanese mortgage terms are pretty normal and property prices are much lower than in the west (even the bubble only really affected central Tokyo). There's a practice of an elderly parent being able to get a mortgage that's then "inherited" by a child, in cases where the parent is retired or close to retirement, but it's pretty much a face-saving (and tax-avoidance) measure.
mikepurvis
This conundrum comes up sometimes in the context of generational starships, about intermediate generations being born into bondage board, committed by their ancestors to a shitty life in a metal tube, with their only purpose being a preordained duty to keep a few systems operational and produce the next generation of slaves just so that eventually someone can birth the arrival generation.
Alastair Reynolds' book Chasm City touches on a bunch of this, in particular the class warfare angle of some wealthy travelers getting to enjoy the journey in peaceful cryosleep while the poor ones pay for their passage in servitude.
jstanley
> being born into bondage board, committed by their ancestors to a shitty life in a metal tube, with their only purpose being a preordained duty to keep a few systems operational and produce the next generation of slaves just so that eventually someone can birth the arrival generation.
This isn't really so different from being born on Earth, except that we take being born on Earth for granted, and the population is really really big.
parpfish
I spend too much time thinking about all the stuff that can go wrong on generation ships.
You take off for your destination, but when you get there you find out that humans back on earth made a faster ship 100 years after you left and beat you to the destination.
You spent generations expecting to be bold explorers pushing the frontier and getting to claim nice territory, and you show up to find you’re in second place.
ryandrake
Heinlein also tackled some of these problems with generation ships in Orphans of the Sky[1].
dpc050505
There's always an opportunity cost to making art. Taking your argument to it's extreme people should never paint or make music but instead spend all their time growing food and building homes (and distributing those goods because that's a big crux, we could feed everyone on the planet if we got food to the right people).
The cool thing about freedom is that we don't have to be rational monks that are slave to economic utilitarism.
jl6
Maybe a crisis will occur and maybe our descendants will have to make a tough choice, but that could enrich the story of the performance. If they choose to end the performance for whatever reason, that’s their business. The hopes and desires of one generation can only hold sway over the next for so long.
jacobgkau
> If they choose to end the performance for whatever reason, that’s their business.
Well, in this case, "you can already buy a ticket to the finale, so your distant descendants can go see it." Selling tickets for an event that far in the future makes it the business of the ticket purchaser and whoever they leave the tickets for.
Is the money collected from the tickets being held in such a way that it can be refunded if/when this project fails before another 600 years have gone by? If not, it seems like a potential scam in that sense.
hinkley
They couldn’t even quarry the Washington Monument out of a single color of stone. It’s not that visible in pictures but if you go see it on a sunny day it’s hard to ignore that stupid line in the middle.
If you take too long building a cathedral the quarry might exhaust itself in the meantime. So even if you keep to the design it might not look right.
> The outside facing consists, due to the interrupted building process, of three different kinds of white marble.
groby_b
That's the beauty of a long-term commitment. You are stating so much confidence about the future that you say "yes, we can have a functioning society and set aside these resources".
Sure, you can create scenarios were that fails. You can do that for anything. The power lies in saying "we are willing to remove these paths from consideration because we as a people are committed to not letting them occur".
It's a model that fails if you apply first-order utilitarian calculus. But the intangible value of the hope and commitment in it likely overshadows any immediate gain. This isn't about how to maximize utilization or optionality. It's a bold statement about who we are, and a lodestar to aspire to. (Which is, ultimately, the job art does)
tshaddox
It's a neat goal to keep an organ playing for hundreds of years. I just don't think that's related to the musical composition itself, which is not impressive to me. The fact that Cage added the phrase "as slow as possible" is not, in my opinion, musically interesting.
It would be analogous to writing a screenplay, adding the note "produce the film using as much money as possible," and then having someone attempt to do that. It's technically impressive to spend $500 million on a film production, sure, but that small note at the end of the screenplay is not cinematically interesting.
hbsbsbsndk
It's not surprising that people who love AI and NFTs are willfully ignorant about what makes art meaningful. It's a sadly transactional view of the world.
mingus88
It’s obvious that many people in this industry believe themselves to be supremely intelligent and curious hacker types, yet they obviously never taken a humanities course.
They have a huge blind spot that they aren’t even aware of, or worse just devalue the entire history of human thought and creation that doesn’t involve hard science.
trbleclef
Your comment will rattle a few cages here but I honestly think about this all the time, as one of the minority of music educators around HN. The blind spots (or perhaps a STEM vs STEAM upbringing) are unfortunate. We are possibly the only — or one of an incredibly small number of — species that even makes sounds solely for enjoyment and aesthetics. The humanities are what make us us.
dontlikeyoueith
Most of them don't value hard science either.
dmoy
I can appreciate art, and play music at a pretty damn good level myself, but still think that John Cage is totally wack.
I don't dislike all strange music - Satie and Poulenc are some of my favorites. But a lot of John Cage's stuff is... no longer music.
Like I'm sorry, but 4'33" is not music.
I draw a line somewhere, and a lot of John Cage's stuff is wayyyyyyyyy the fuck over the line.
Sure maybe it's some kind of art, but it's not music.
nottorp
Ok but why would you need a "humanities course" to appreciate art?
plastic-enjoyer
We call this people "Fachidioten" in Germany, people who are really good at their craft but absolute morons in every other field. Unfortunately, these are the people that dominate tech and you can see this in how technology develops.
egypturnash
Google Translate renders this in English as "Specialist idiots" and I like that.
TiredOfLife
But that word equally describes artists
AlexandrB
I don't see how that follows. Avant-garde music of this type is basically an NFT already. All of its value is in the novelty, none is in the aesthetics. The meaning of the piece is completely externalized to the identity of its author and the history of its composition and cannot be derived from observing the piece itself. That describes NFTs to a tee! The only thing missing the layer of cryptography on top.
airstrike
Why are you making such sweeping assumptions about us? I studied architecture and art history for over a year, I'm the son of a painter, I have an uncle who's a Grammy-winning musician and an aunt who's a musical scholar who literally has a doctorate degree on John f* Cage of all people... which is to say I grew up surrounded by art. I've visited every museum you can name this side of the Berlin Wall's remains, many more than once.
I have a degree in humanities, another in business and another in computer science.... and while I still don't mind Cage that much, I do think most of contemporary art is absolute shit.
I don't have to agree with you for my opinion to have value. You need to learn to name call people less and make your points on the merits of arguments. It's tiring for everyone else to engage otherwise.
lolinder
This is an incredibly reductive dismissal of a very diverse group of people who don't find Cage's art in particular to be meaningful.
BoingBoomTschak
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HelloMcFly
I get the frustration with art discourse that it can feel exclusionary or pretentious. There are definitely versions of that discussion that are more about gatekeeping than appreciation.
I think the original, parent comment was coming from a much more generous place. Like that top parent commenter, to me the Halberstadt organ piece isn’t about being highbrow or obscure; it’s about a kind of radical optimism—committing to something weird, beautiful, and long-term in a world that often feels very short-sighted. I don’t think you need to read Derrida or listen to Stockhausen to find meaning in that. Just as you don’t need to love AI or NFTs to appreciate innovation.
Many may think that's stupid or useless because it lacks utility (or any other reason) or seems arbitrary. Reasonable people can disagree, but I think such reactions are truly missing the point; that is simultaneously completely OK, but also personally dispiriting at times. There’s room for a lot of perspectives in how we engage with art, and I think it’s more interesting when we try to understand what someone finds meaningful before writing it off.
korkybuchek
Assume you already know about this given your interests, but just in case: https://longnow.org/
null
7bit
Does the ticket come with a snorkeling set?
seydor
Cage died in 1992 , this is not contemporary art
thih9
> Contemporary art is a term used to describe the art of today, generally referring to art produced from the 1970s onwards.
wtcactus
[flagged]
dang
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
mingus88
If you have ever dabbled in philosophy at all, your notion of “real art” would be the first thing you would have to challenge.
“What is music” is one of those questions that leads to some truly subversive trains of thought and it’s amazing to read all of you so called hackers having trouble wrapping your head around a work that goes against your comfortable worldview.
wtcactus
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labrador
639 years? Big deal, The Long Now foundation built a clock to last 10,000 years. I hate John Cage since I got his massive world-wide hit 4′33″ stuck in my head.
muppetman
I just need you to know that I went and googled "John Cage 4'33" " and now I am quite upset with you for this comment!!!
margalabargala
> The Long Now foundation built a clock to last 10,000 years
The Long Now Foundation is attempting to build a clock to last 10,000 years.
Construction began close to a decade ago, and there is no estimated completion date. Construction of the clock may well last 10,000 years.
tbrownaw
> The Long Now Foundation is attempting to build a clock to last 10,000 years.
The pyramids are only half that old, and they've accumulated a fair bit of damage despite being solid stone.
Rebelgecko
I think at one point the Van Horn TX clock was considered a "prototype" or another one that would be built incorporating lessons learned, although I don't know if that's still the plan.
Coincidentally the clock will ring with a cycle of chimes that repeats every 10,000 years
pfd1986
The foundation cocktail place in SF has some art on the wall that changes every minute. I can't remember if by John Cage or someone else..
speed_spread
One thing I like about 4′33″ is that it is very compressible, especially the studio version. The live version, a little less so.
labrador
I like it stretched. The 800% slower version is amazing.
salynchnew
I am so happy that this is in my HN feed today.
I wish there was more stuff like this, both in my feed and in the world.
gweinberg
It doesn't make sense to me that the piece should start with a 17 month rest. Surely it doesn't really start until the first note is played?
Isamu
It’s a deliberate provocation, he certainly anticipated exactly this sort of response.
In a sense he is exploiting a lack of rules that would prevent a piece from starting with this long of a rest.
In other words, he is hacking the process.
dahart
To be fair, while the piece is a deliberate provocation, like some of his others, the rest wasn’t imagined by Cage to take 17 months, that’s just an artifact of someone else’s decision to play the piece for 639 years. In typical performances while Cage was alive, the opening rest wasn’t more than a few seconds.
itishappy
Ever been to see an orchestra play? In my opinion, the part where the conductor puts his hands up and the audience and orchestra both grow quiet in anticipation of the start of the piece is semantic.
ssttoo
Beethoven’s 5th symphony (da-da-da-DAA) starts with a rest too, it’s not unusual to notate like this. Many pieces have “pickup” measures which are not complete and much shorter than a full measure. But when the pickup is more than 50% of a normal measure, it’s no longer much of a pickup and starting with a rest to make up the complete measure makes sense.
bigstrat2003
That's all fine and dandy when you're talking about a genuine piece of music. But for something like this, counting a rest that goes for 17 years is taking it way too far.
robin_reala
17 months. But in what sense isn’t this a genuine peice of music? It certainly meets Merriam-Webster’s definition:
a: vocal, instrumental, or mechanical sounds having rhythm, melody, or harmony
b: the science or art of ordering tones or sounds in succession, in combination, and in temporal relationships to produce a composition having unity and continuity
mingus88
Please explain what makes a composition “genuine” and show your work
noman-land
This is as genuine a piece of music as the original.
itishappy
Not the 639 year recital?
cfbolztereick
Complaining about a rest (however long) in a piece by the composer of 4'33'' is certainly A Take.
williamdclt
Regardless of the philosophy of it (which is certainly interesting), many pieces uncontroversially start with a rest. If the first bar doesn’t start on a note, then the piece starts on a rest.
You could argue that the first bar is actually shorter than all the following ones and only starts on the first note, but… no one thinks like that that I ever heard of
jancsika
> Surely it doesn't really start until the first note is played?
That question itself is built on a radical assumption. Example:
Just skimming, it looks like 38 out of 48 of the fugues from Bach's WTC Books 1 & 2 begin with rests followed by several beats worth of melodies in the first measure[1]. If you think the piece only really starts when the first note of the melody is played, then you've got problems. Either:
1. You hear the first articulation of the melody as the downbeat. But that would mean the first measure is in a disparate (and probably irregular) meter. Radical!
2. You hear the incomplete first measure as an anacrusis, or a kind of unaccented lead-in, to the second measure: OMG even more radical!
You can use accent patterns on a modern piano to play any of these fugues using either of these methods, and it will sound silly to non-silly keyboard players.
What's more, non-silly keyboard players do feel the pulse for the first downbeat of these pieces when they perform. Most of them will even inhale before the downbeat, as if they are somehow singing the melody through their fingers.
Finally, lots of music begins with rests: not just conservative cases like Bach, but progressive cases like the beginning of Beethoven's Fifth, and of course the radical cases like Cage's.
This leads to one of the things I love about Cage's music: it compels criticisms that reveal fundamental misunderstandings about music. E.g., you don't buy the radical case-- perhaps reasonable. But you then speculate there are no cases-- which is at odds with common musical practice.
If Cage's music did nothing but compel these questions it would be worth its weight in pine nuts.
Edit:
1: Bach does this because nearly all the fugues have three or more independent melodies singing at the same time. If they are all singing on every downbeat it can quickly sound really clunky and predictable.
lmm
> If you think the piece only really starts when the first note of the melody is played, then you've got problems. Either:
> 1. You hear the first articulation of the melody as the downbeat. But that would mean the first measure is in a disparate (and probably irregular) meter. Radical!
> 2. You hear the incomplete first measure as an anacrusis, or a kind of unaccented lead-in, to the second measure: OMG even more radical!
Why? Why can't you just say the piece starts partway through a bar, and we notate that with a rest for convenience? Just as when a piece ends partway through a bar we would generally accept that it ends when the last note ends (and while we might notate that as being a full bar in the case of a long held note, we don't always play it that way), not after some trailing rests, and we wouldn't consider this as being some kind of radical accented thing.
tokai
Check out his other work 4'33". It's an even more extreme try at silence as music.
goldchainposse
It looks like this is his gimmick.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3#/media/F...
Haters gonna hate, but there's not much more to his work than using extreme pauses and tempos as art. Maybe it's meta art.
null
mykowebhn
Not unless it was a "meaningful", aka "musical", rest
watersb
Remember where you were when the eighth drop of pitch fell in Queensland?
Man, that was wild.
comrade1234
Someone must have played it sped up? Is the music public?
salynchnew
Yes, but the piece is specifically composed to be played "as slowly as possible" fwiw.
cactacea
You're missing the point.
hinkley
We’re missing the performance otherwise. Unless you’re immortal.
jjulius
You're not missing the performance. It's playing right now, and will play your entire life. You just don't get to see what comes next, how it changes, and how it ends.
Just like life.
Carrok
I think you're starting to make progress towards the point.
BoingBoomTschak
Is there a point?
gred
This makes me think of the Hari Seldon recordings which play over the course of centuries in the "Foundation" books by Isaac Asimov.
Carrok
To be a bit pedantic, those recordings are played at real time for normal speech, and have gaps between anything being played of centuries. They don't play continuously for that long, unlike this project which does play continuously.
soupfordummies
Ah dammit, just take it once again from the top
throw310822
Oddly enough, Bach's BWV 639 is one of my favourite (organ) pieces. But it appears to be just a coincidence, since the length was decided as the number of years since the construction of the first organ in Halberstadt to the new millennium.
seydor
avant garde is so 20th century
brookst
I weep for the future of post-post-modernism.
sayamqazi
I bet every generation before us thought the same and every generation after us will think the same.
josefritzishere
This is one of the core tenets in the mythology of social conservatism. This notion that somehow thigns cam somehow stay the same... forever. This is usually expressed with wording around values, tradition and customs.
NelsonMinar
Here's a video (with sound) of one of the other chord changes. It didn't occur to me they'd just swap in a pipe instead of pressing a key on a keyboard.
Some art-haters in the comments, so to defend this piece of contemporary art for a moment: one thing I love about it is a commitment to the long future of art, creativity, and civilization. What does it take to keep an instrument playing for six hundred years? To commit to that idea -- like the century-long projects of cathedral building in the middle ages, or the idea of planting trees you won't live to see mature -- is (to me) the awesome thing about the Halberstadt performance. All rendered in a medium (church organ) that has existed for an even longer time.
It's a pretty hopeful, optimistic view of the future in a time of high uncertainty, but also represents a positive argument: it's worth doing these things because they are interesting, weird, and fun, and because they represent a continuity with past and future people we will never meet.
Plus, you can already buy a ticket to the finale, so your distant descendants can go see it :)