some guy wrote:As for the Halberstadt performance of Cage's Organ2, ASLSP, it is not being played by humans. Each key is attached to a weight. Unless John means that the weights being changed (every few years or so) by humans counts as humans playing it. (The organ that's playing it is not the 639 year old, either, but one that's being built, pipe by pipe, to accommodate each chord change.)
All I know is what I read in the papers.
some guy wrote:And remember, before we get too carried away with calling this silly, remember where this is being done. This is in Germany. This is a place where there are things like a bakery that's been in the same family for over 800 years. (I.e., not in Kansas.)
Completely different enterprises, in every way but the number of years. Passing on a family trade or business from parents to children is not silly; it's been the natural thing to do as long as historical memory. A piece of so-called music which can't possibly be listened to, meaning not only that it goes on beyond any imaginable human life span but that no one can get any moment-to-moment continuity out of it at all, is as I said pointless and silly - taken as music. If you want to classify it as not music but something else - an employment scheme for organ builders, say - that wouldn't be silly in the same way, though it might be silly nonetheless.
Satie was not stupid or insane, and knew full well that repeating "Vexations" 840 times would be a silly thing to do. Did he imagine it would ever be done? Did he care? Did he even want that? What he wrote is, "In order to play the theme 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." Like so many of the words he attached to his compositions, this is a joke. But in our literal age, it's perhaps not surprising that some took it literally and actually did it.
As for "The Longplayer," the piece of music actually composed by Jem Finer is 20 minutes and 20 seconds long, and was recorded shortly before the "performance" began. The Longplayer web site says:
Longplayer grew out of a conceptual concern with problems of representing and understanding the fluidity and expansiveness of time. While it found form as a musical composition, it can also be understood as a living, 1000 year long process – an artificial life form programmed to seek its own survival strategies. More than a piece of music, Longplayer is a social organism, depending on people – and the communication between people – for its continuation, and existing as a community of listeners across centuries.
High-sounding bafflegab, typical of the whole website, but interesting in that it finesses the process's ostensible
musical function, not to mention its quality and value
as music. Any number of existing pieces of music might have done as well as a starting point, because this isn't about the original human-composed piece but the computer's applying its "simple algorithm" (according to Wikipedia) to spin it out by (I'm guessing) adjusting the synchronization of the original recording's tracks year after year, century after century, world without end. Which of course raises another question.
Incidentally, the website provides a link so that if you don't want to go to the sites in London, San Francisco, etc. where it's being played out loud, you can get a sample at home. I clicked on it and it didn't work; you may be luckier.
http://longplayer.org/index.php
I took in about an hour of it, was duly vexed, and beat it.