Posted on 09/07/2020 8:25:03 PM PDT by BenLurkin
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 wrote Organ/ASLSP in the 1980s.
(Excerpt) Read more at upi.com ...
Yeah, it must have hit something sharp.
They changed the chord.
Was it flat?
—
Winter is coming, Best to change to a lighter weight chord in cold weather for easier starting.
What time is it?
I’m going to go with cracra....
Great song by the way.
Who was worse Cage or Stockhausen with his experimental music?
I thought my computer was about to blue-screen....
Is it over yet?
Give it a chance. You really don’t get to know a piece like this until you’ve heard it a few times.
I've got a CD of John Cage around here somewhere. [and now the punchline] I started playing it when I bought it 20 years ago, and it still hasn't ended.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/entertainment/music/a-mushroom-related-brush-with-mortality-how-john-cage-fell-for-fungi/ar-BB189oE5
Sort of like a Geico radio commercial. It repeats over and over and over and over ...
I was a student worker in the Music Library of the UIUC (University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana) back in the 60’s. John Cage was a visiting Professor in the Music Dept. and would frequently come to the Music Library to check out books, etc. He was a short guy (kind of reminds me a bit of Elton John) sometimes wore a beret-like hat, very affected, and smoked cigarettes using a fancy cigarette holder. Very eccentric, but was very nice to the very young me who did many of his check-outs.
Went to a couple of his “concerts” in the Music Hall, and he and some famous French, I believe, harpsichordist created a “happening” (this was late beatnik and the beginning of the hippy years) on campus that was held in the UIUC all concrete Assembly Hall, shaped just like a flying saucer (still there on campus I might add).
In the upper far recesses of the Assembly Hall tape recorders were placed making strange sounds all around the circular bldg. And then there was the famous harsichordist (a woman) playing in the middle of all this, dressed like a harlequin if memory serves me, along with other various placed harpsichord players and it was all most strange. As you walked into the Assembly Hall, there was a kaleidoscope of lights flashing, kind of a wind tunnel you walked through with colored gauzy scarf-like thingies swirling around you; it was kind of like running a gauntlet of flashing colored lights and gauze cloth whipping at you as you entered the Hall.
It was surreal, but I must admit rather fun in a totally chaotic, nonsensical way. The harpsichordist was very good though. UIUC had a rather large experimental music department at that time which is why John Cage was there to collaborate with his fellow experimental music colleagues.
The Music Dept. was chock full of eccentrics, both students and professors. There was one guy who was literally dismantling a small organ (or was it a harpsichord) and hiding the parts in the Music Bldg basement, taking it apart and removing the pieces to heaven knows where, one by one. He also would swipe music manuscripts, but got caught.
Everyone knew he was nuts (he used to parade down the main campus drag wearing kilts and playing the bagpipes, going in and out of stores and bars along the way). I think he ended up in the clink for a while, if memory serves me, but not for long as he was a certifiable loony bird. An excellent and very intelligent musician though. Those were interesting days.
>>Hundreds of people flocked to a German church Saturday to hear an organ change chords for the first time in nearly seven years.
Starved for live entertainment they are yes yes
Musicians make good mathematcians. Not generally the other way around. Somewhere in this guy’s history is a large- intergenerational trust set up for him by his wealthy parents. The nature of his work did not lend itself to “concerts” that a public audience might want to sit through. Certainly not the 639 year’s long silence with a changed chord every now and then— although can picture the kind of German audience would show up to hear... one chord.
And yet he had inspiration from melodic music composers, especially contrapuntal. In all this-— a non-professional diagnosis would at a minimum be Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (which he would not like since he was all about ordering/organizing chance events and musical notes). An odd duck, in short. Give me Andre Segovia or Carlos Montoya.
” to hear an organ change chords for the first time in nearly seven years. “
But the basis of that chord change is certainly of repute.
it’ll be the new FREEBIRD
“John Cage was a mushroom enthusiast.”
He had a book he wrote which was in the Music Library I worked in when very young at UIUC, and I remember flipping through the book. I was about his musical life but interspersed throughout was mushroom lore, his second passion next to experimental music.
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