John Cage recital set to last 639 years recently witnessed a chord change

This is the same guy who wrote 4'33", the silent piece.

I kinda get that -- the 40000 Hz podcast gave it some good context:

https://podcasts.apple.com/fr/podcast/433-by-john-cage-twent...

Maybe they'll also explain the point of this. The piece is called "As Slow As Possible", but it's not as slow as possible. The slowest possible piece would have a fermata with an infinity sign over the first note, and that's it. Maybe the rest of it would be a jaunty little tune that would never be played in context. ("Shave and a haircut", perhaps?)

As a stunt, it's moderately interesting. How do you set up a contraption to play for hundreds of years? How do you maintain it without interrupting the performance? But it's less interesting than the 10,000 year clock.

> The slowest possible piece would have a fermata with an infinity sign over the first note, and that's it.

But then the piece would never be completely played, which seems like a requirement for Cage's musical game / art / philosophical statement.

Moreover, your hypothetical piece could still technically be played at a high tempo. It seems like the point of the Cage piece is to play it at the slowest possible tempo, not over the greatest length of time possible (and that's why the fermata idea doesn't fit). (So while you're correct that 639 years doesn't represent the slowest tempo possible (just play it over 640 years instead, right?) it's the idea of extreme slowness that's interesting. Or perhaps "as slow as possible" refers to the tempo that really was as slow as possible (at the time it was set up) because of technological constraints.

Without having deeply researched the piece, I wonder if 639 years was chosen with any relation to Tesla's 3–6–9 idea.

Edit: It looks like the 639 years comes from the "performer(s)" who set up the equipment, not from Cage himself. The composer only gave the instruction to play it as slowly as possible, which plays into the technological-limitations idea above, I think.

Saying “As slow as possible” isn’t followable any more than putting an infinity sign next to a note. You can’t know how long a piece of equipment lasts unless you decide to break it at an arbitrary time.

These performers choose a completely arbitrary number independent of technical limitations, and then ran into technical limitations.

In other words “interpretation”

It’s so funny coming from a musical background and reading all these comments of people who have no idea what they are talking about criticizing one of the worlds most famous modern composers

Every performance ever done has been the performer interpreting the composer’s score and making it their own. Nobody want to hear a robotic perfectly accurate recreation of what is on the page, because even the act of transcription alters the composer’s intent. The score is not the art!

There is no perfection in art. It’s all subjective, by the literal definition of art.