This is a video I found on a ridiculous discussion - how slow can we write a piece of music? One YT performance played a note daily for a month, and uploaded it for your 24 hour, 30 day pleasure(?).
So if you have a student interested in music, this will either get a "cool" or a series of eye rolls that will immediately help you discern your pupils' interest in music theory.
Hey, at least it's not a discussion about the Beatles!
Here is a BBC article which gives some more details:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2728595.stm
Please make your travel arrangements in the next month to be one of the folks that see the performance in person.
The most difficult part of teaching classical music to non-majors for me has always been 20th century non tonal stuff. Over the past five years or so I came up with the idea of combining it with 20th century movie music scores, and that has become the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down. One particularly effective example is playing a concert video of Ligeti’s Requiem with the class discussing how “weird it sounds,” then showing the same passage used in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” But they love Herrmann and Jarre and North and Morricone and Ifukube, helps them get through Schonberg and Crumb and Glass and Poeme Electronique.
>...how slow can we write a piece of music?
In my case I’ve been working on my “Kitchen Sink Concerto #1” for over a decade.
As far as John Cage, I’m sure that, had he been composing a few decades later he would have taken advantage of the wonderful tools that the computer affords in aiding the musical process.
I’m sure he would have taken advantage of “Paulstretch”, a free piece of software found here http://hypermammut.sourceforge.net/paulstretch/ that allows one to slow down audio files. There are a lot of examples on YouTube that use a factor of 800%, such as the following...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phAVrw11GNI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI0LCYspTN4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDI4Vm9tAys
I find it quite useful for making drones and ambient beds for pieces, as well as allowing me to smooth out technical mistakes I make on keyboard.
To get results that positivly dwarf ASLSP one can use hyperstretch mode. The user can slow things down by 1e+18x so that a one minute audio file will take 1.90129 trillion years to play ! The only problem is that if one were to try to render the file as a .wav a solution would have to be found for storing the rather large file size.