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

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/what-were-we-all-doing-here-my-600-mile-trip-to-hear-an-organ-play-a-d-natural/

by pseudolus • 1 year ago

218 175 1 year ago

spectator.co.uk

jfengel• 1 year ago

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.

treetalker• 1 year ago

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.

Svip• 1 year ago

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

From http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2728595.stm

They settled on 639 years because the Halberstadt organ was 639 years old in the year 2000.

Retric3• 1 year ago

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.

ehnto2• 1 year ago

Adam Neely and his band Sungazer did an interesting live experiment with his audiences, to figure out the slowest beat or pulse that people would be able to "feel" and dance to. Slowest possible isn't really as interesting in my opinion as slowest practical, which I think Neely and co's experiment explored. The track was Threshold on the album Perihelion.

The whole album explored beat, pulse and timings as it relates to how people can actually feel and interact with music. Really interesting!

markedathome• 1 year ago

is that also the album/live shows that had the audience dancing to the beats 1,2,3,4 which they thought was 4/4 but in such a way that the underlying time-signature was different?

nkrisc• 1 year ago

The piece is called "As Slow As Possible", but it's not as slow as possible.

In what way is it “possible” to play an infinitely long piece of music?

thaumasiotes• 1 year ago

How do you set up a contraption to play for hundreds of years? How do you maintain it without interrupting the performance?

All you need is more than one source of sound and you can maintain each of them while they're not playing.

gus_massa• 1 year ago

How do you set up a contraption to play for hundreds of years? How do you maintain it without interrupting the performance?

You play it with an orchestra (or perhaps a quartet is enough). Players may take turns to eat, sleep, and even have work-life balance. They also may retire (or die) and be replaced by new musicians. (How much would it cost?)

derbOac• 1 year ago

Sort of interesting that the Clock of the Long Now and Cage’s ORGAN2/ASLSP were conceived around the same time — 1989 and 1987, respectively.

Also worth noting the clock's name is from Brian Eno, who has expressed interest in developing chimes for the clock. So Cage's work was kinda presaging the clock.

brookst3• 1 year ago

I think you may be misinterpreting “possible” here. I’m shocked that it’s possible to get funding and interest to make a 639 year piece happen. It is unclear if it will be possible to complete. I do not think it would be possible to make a 10,000 year piece happen.

As with all things, the contraption is not the hard part. It’s the supporting civilization, society, economic context, and will of generations of people.

Cage’s game here is to question the entire scaffolding of art, not the pigments of the paint.

mingus888• 1 year ago

No musical performance is ever a 100% literal translation of the score. That’s pretty much impossible for any work. A score is not a set of MIDI instructions and a performer is not a sound card.

This post is wild because “what is the point of this” seems to be complexly divorced from the human drive to create and express one’s self.

wizzwizz4• 1 year ago

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

That piece has already been written. It's called ॐ.

cess11• 1 year ago

Less known than 4'33" being "silent" (which it's not) is that John Cage was an anarchist.

"Both Fuller and Marshall McLuhan knew, furthermore, that work is now obsolete. We have invented machines to do it for us. Now that we have no need to do anything what shall we do? Looking at Fuller's Geodesic World Map we see that the earth is a single island. Oahu. We must give all the people all they need to live in any way they wish. Our present laws protect the rich from the poor. If there are to be laws we need ones that begin with the acceptance of poverty as a way of life. We must make the earth safe for poverty without dependence on government."

https://monoskop.org/images/9/9c/Cage_John_Anarchy_New_York_... (PDF)

A shorter read here:

https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/09/15/john-cage-silence-...

seydor2• 1 year ago

avant garde is so 20th century

brookst3• 1 year ago

I weep for the future of post-post-modernism.

sayamqazi• 1 year ago

I bet every generation before us thought the same and every generation after us will think the same.

comrade1234• 1 year ago

Someone must have played it sped up? Is the music public?

cactacea• 1 year ago

You're missing the point.

hinkley4• 1 year ago

We’re missing the performance otherwise. Unless you’re immortal.

BoingBoomTschak• 1 year ago

Is there a point?

salynchnew2• 1 year ago

Yes, but the piece is specifically composed to be played "as slowly as possible" fwiw.

dagw3• 1 year ago

Here's a 90 second edit of a 24 hour performance where they have just included the chord changes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vv_bXRMTJog

Fair warning, it sounds very jarring and disjointed.

LorenDB• 1 year ago

https://archive.ph/rHOsC

_petronius• 1 year ago

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 :)

hbsbsbsndk2• 1 year ago

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.

mingus888• 1 year ago

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.

plastic-enjoyer• 1 year ago

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.

AlexandrB• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

TheCondor• 1 year ago

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.

jl6• 1 year ago

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.

dpc050505• 1 year ago

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.

hinkley4• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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)

mikepurvis3• 1 year ago

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.

lmm3• 1 year ago

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.

7bit• 1 year ago

Does the ticket come with a snorkeling set?

seydor2• 1 year ago

Cage died in 1992 , this is not contemporary art

thih9• 1 year ago

Contemporary art is a term used to describe the art of today, generally referring to art produced from the 1970s onwards.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_art

korkybuchek• 1 year ago

Assume you already know about this given your interests, but just in case: https://longnow.org/

tshaddox2• 1 year ago

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.

brookst3• 1 year ago

Cage created art that transcends music and you are rightfully noting that it is not that impressive when judged solely on musical merit.

It’s like saying a dodecahedron isn’t that impressive when viewed sitting on a 2D plane because it’s just a triangke and there are more interesting 2D shapes. True, but so reductive it’s tautological.

globular-toast3• 1 year ago

Yeah, something has been lost in current generations. I'm reminded of Asimov's Foundation books where the protagonist dies at the beginning but leaves behind the foundations of a thousand-year plan to rebuild civilisation after the collapse that he predicts including a time capsule that opens following predicted crises.

I feel like such ideas are of a time, namely the 1950s when things were looking up. Nowadays I feel like everyone is aware that Earth is basically finished but we have no way off of it, so they just try to squeeze as much joy as they can before they die without any thought towards the future at all.

This even comes out in smaller cycles like writing software that works today with no thought about how it will look in a decade. I feel like the stuff they were doing even in 90s was done with the intention of being around for a very long time. Now it's like, yagni, just write any old shit that works.

grues-dinner• 1 year ago

Some Anathem vibes too!

Regarding the YAGNI stuff, that applies to whole companies. All you have to do is stack the cobbled-together shit high enough to get bought and exit. Even the founders aren't in it for a sustainable long term business. In fact that goal is derisively called a "lifestyle business".

mcv• 1 year ago

And while it may be contemporary avant garde now, by the time the performance is finished, it will be a timeless classic.

throw310822• 1 year ago

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.

stavros3• 1 year ago

In theory, a pipe organ can sound indefinitely, so long as it receives adequate power and its pedals are pressed continually. [..] Thus, the only threats to this performance are the survival of the organ, the will of the unborn and the erratic tides of arts funding.

And, you know, power outages.

chmod775• 1 year ago

Halberstadt seems to last have had a power outage in 2023. I wonder if the organ has battery backup...

mingus888• 1 year ago

TIL that there were no organ works in the history of humanity until electrical power was invented

stavros3• 1 year ago

Oh I didn't realize we had donkeys powering this organ 24/7 for 600 years.

saalweachter• 1 year ago

If the music pauses for less than 1/64 note, has it really stopped?

stavros3• 1 year ago

If it's meant to never pause, yes.

soupfordummies• 1 year ago

Ah dammit, just take it once again from the top

salynchnew2• 1 year ago

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.

test1235• 1 year ago

The anticipation was palpable, with at least six other tourists wandering the cold brick hall, there to hear the final hours of this loud and, after a time, torturous sound.

Just reading that line alone brightened up my morning. You can admire something and still find it a bit silly.

eszed2• 1 year ago

I find many things admirable because they're silly. :-)

gweinberg• 1 year ago

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?

itishappy2• 1 year ago

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.

hinkley4• 1 year ago

Especially given how loud and sometimes discordant the tuning process is.

kbutler• 1 year ago

In a live orchestra performance, the conductor raises his hands. The audience quiets in anticipation.

He gives an up tick indicating the beginning of the music, then the downbeat of the start of the first measure.

No sound is heard.

The conductor continues to mark time. The silence is deep...profound.

The conductor continues to mark the time of the passing measures.

The audience listens.

At some point, positive sound breaks the silence - suddenly, loudly destroying the stillness! Or possibly very nearly silently - at the uncertain threshold of perception, the audible music begins...

lazystar• 1 year ago

the audible music begins...

right, so it begins when the music starts playing?

mykowebhn• 1 year ago

Not unless it was a "meaningful", aka "musical", rest

ssttoo• 1 year ago

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.

bigstrat20032• 1 year ago

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.

Isamu• 1 year ago

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.

dahart4• 1 year ago

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.

bongodongobob• 1 year ago

Lots of music starts with rests. If the first note isn't on the 1, you'll have rests before it. Not usual at all.

feoren2• 1 year ago

If the first note isn't on the 1, you'll write rests before it, so that the person reading your sheet music understands what's going on. That doesn't mean the music has started yet. The notation is not the music.

tokai• 1 year ago

Check out his other work 4'33". It's an even more extreme try at silence as music.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3

goldchainposse• 1 year ago

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.

cfbolztereick• 1 year ago

Complaining about a rest (however long) in a piece by the composer of 4'33'' is certainly A Take.

williamdclt• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

lmm3• 1 year ago

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.

feoren2• 1 year ago

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 is this radical at all? This is exactly how most humans perceive it: as a lead-in to the second (I might even argue first) measure. It's very strange to me to say that most humans are supposed to understand the piece to have started before any sound is played. In fact that's quite preposterous: play a song that starts with a rest to 1000 people and ask them to gesture as soon as the song starts, and every single one of them will gesture on the first note played. How are they supposed to perceive the song to have started any earlier than that? A song "starting with rests" is written that way to make it understandable to the performer who is reading the notation. It's a purely notational thing. The notation is not the song, the sound is the song.

rtpg• 1 year ago

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.

Love this thought. You disagree with an extreme interpretation, do you take the exact opposite? If not, up to where do you go?

This idea is applicable to so much

fullshark• 1 year ago

* mimes jerk off motion *

The art community is no longer about celebrating humanity or beauty or inspiring people, it's instead about proving its intellectual / class superiority, that they don't have to work all day in the fields and worry about other people's problems like the common folk do, but instead can pontificate about nonsense with the best of them.

NelsonMinar• 1 year ago

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3BBgQPuPI0

labrador3• 1 year ago

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.

pfd1986• 1 year ago

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..

muppetman• 1 year ago

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!!!

labrador3• 1 year ago

It's quite an ear worm!

speed_spread• 1 year ago

One thing I like about 4′33″ is that it is very compressible, especially the studio version. The live version, a little less so.

labrador3• 1 year ago

I like it stretched. The 800% slower version is amazing.

margalabargala• 1 year ago

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.

Rebelgecko• 1 year ago

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

tbrownaw• 1 year ago

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.

globular-toast3• 1 year ago

You joke but my current goal in life is to be able to wake up somewhere that I can enjoy 4'33" every day. I'm just so sick of the noise.

bell-cot• 1 year ago

Obligatory XKCD reference: https://xkcd-time.fandom.com/wiki/Hugo_Award#Acceptance_Spee...

gred• 1 year ago

This makes me think of the Hari Seldon recordings which play over the course of centuries in the "Foundation" books by Isaac Asimov.

Carrok2• 1 year ago

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.

globular-toast3• 1 year ago

Something you realise about a melody is its not about the notes, it's about the intervals. Nor is rhythm about the time at which it is played, rather it is about the relative time between events. So you could argue the music is only really happening when things change, as they did on this day. So I see this more as a time capsule similar to Seldon crises rather than a piece that is continually playing, but your interpretation can be different. Cage's 4'33" certainly challenges my interpretation.

andyjohnson0• 1 year ago

Longplayer: a one-thousand year long composition

https://longplayer.org/

watersb• 1 year ago

Remember where you were when the eighth drop of pitch fell in Queensland?

Man, that was wild.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment

johnea• 1 year ago

So, an organ changed to a new chord, and I'm supposed to pay to _read_ about it?

I find the subject mildly interesting, but the paywalled internet is just another sign of end stage capitalism...

moon2• 1 year ago

Finally some good news.

encom• 1 year ago

Paywalled.

https://archive.ph/Ko4pe

neuroelectron• 1 year ago

How about that

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

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