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Composers count themselves lucky when musicians continue to perform their music after their death. But the American avant-garde composer John Cage, who died in 1992, never would have guessed that a single performance of his music would begin in 2001 and still be playing. In fact, it isn’t due to conclude for another 616 years. In a marathon performance like this, any little change becomes big news. On Feb. 5, 2011, for instance, one of the first three notes stopped sounding – after being sustained for eight years. On Feb. 5, 2023, another note is going to begin playing –...

Hundreds of people flocked to a German church Saturday to hear an organ change chords for the first time in nearly seven years. The experimental piece, which consists of eight pages of music meant to be played very slowly, is intended to last for an entirety of 639 years -- meaning it will end in 2640 if all goes according to plan. The organ had been playing the same chord for six years and 11 months before Saturday's chord change Best known for a composition called 4'33" -- which is just four minutes and 33 seconds of silence -- Cage...

This is a video of the October 5, 2013 note change that took place as part of the 639-year-long performance of John Cage's "As SLow aS Possible" (ASLSP) at the St. Buchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany. The note that had been playing since July 5, 2012 is very quiet and hard to hear in this video, but the 3 notes that make up the new chord are clear. Check it out in this 4 minute video.

Andrew Yang, the 44-year-old tech entrepreneur from New York running for president, may have the most extensive and wildest platform in the Democratic field. 1. A domestic infrastructure force called the " Legion of Builders and Destroyers." Under his proposal to modernize military spending, Yang has a scheme to divert 10 percent of military funding toward an infrastructure task force he calls “The Legion of Builders and Destroyers.” The head of this task force would be called “The Commander,” and he would be given the power to overrule local zoning laws and city regulations to make sure the building and...

To many artists, he was one of the most inspiring figures of the 20th century. To some musicians, he is underrated: branded, unfairly, more important as a thinker than a composer. And to a large segment of the public, he’s a charlatan: a man who convinced some people that sitting onstage in silence for four minutes and 33 seconds could be construed as performing a work of music. John Cage — composer, philosopher, visual artist, mushroom enthusiast — would have been 100 years old on Wednesday. This week Washington, usually somewhat conservative in its musical tastes, is challenging its own...

It's a video clip that takes just a bit to download so stay with it. I can't believe they hired an orchestra for this. And that people paid for it...

HALBERSTADT, Germany (AFP) - A new chord was scheduled to sound in the world's slowest and longest lasting concert that is taking a total 639 years to perform. The abandoned Buchardi church in Halberstadt, eastern Germany, is the venue for a mind-boggling 639-year-long performance of a piece of music by US experimental composer John Cage (1912-1992). Entitled "organ2/ASLSP" (or "As SLow aS Possible"), the performance began on September 5, 2001 and is scheduled to last until 2639. The first year and half of the performance was total silence, with the first chord -- G-sharp, B and G-sharp -- not sounding...

Composer John Cage's 1950's piece entitled 3 Minutes and 27 Seconds is the world's quietest piece of music. In this arrangement, a piano player simply sits himself before his instrument for that period of time, and then leaves without playing a single note. Cage's concept? The ambient sounds made by the audience is the music.

Loose Ends: Did John Cage Invent Silence? Music copyright infringement can be a fairly tricky thing. Some cases, like the fiasco over the similarity between Huey Lewis' "I Want A New Drug" and the Ghostbusters theme, are reasonable. Others are a little more iffy. For instance, can anyone own a copyright on the sound of silence? According to the estate of late avant-garde composer John Cage, yes. Cage, as you may remember, perplexed an audience decades ago with a "composition" called "4'33," which featured him sitting in front of a piano, in complete silence, for exactly four minutes and...

THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES, OR THE METAPHYSICS OF MUSIC . . . According to tradition, the harmonic structure of music was discovered by Pythagoras about the fifth century B.C. Pythagoras experimented with a stretched piece of cord. When plucked, the cord sounded a certain note. When halved in length and plucked again, the cord sounded a higher note completely consonant with the first. In fact, it was the same note at a higher pitch. Pythagoras had discovered the ration 2:1, of the octave. Further experiments, plucking the strings two-thirds of its original length produced a perfect fifth in the...