When I first discovered the legendery avant-garde American composer John Cage, I was trying to create an ultra-clean Mormon friendly version of the song Thrift Shop by Macklemore.

The year was 2012 and Thrift Shop had just hit the airwaves of my Dallas-area radio station. I was carpooling back from a tennis meet in the backseat of my friend Sean Trimmier’s mom’s SUV when I heard the ‘what what, what what?’ intro chorus grace my ears for the first time. When the sax came in I was hooked. I got home and searched for the clean version on my iPod touch, and played it over the devices tinny speakers. However, as the seconds ticked by, so did my dread. The song had eight instances of the word ‘hell’ or ‘hella’, three ‘damns’ and one very long ‘pissssssssss’.

As a devoted 13 year old Mormon boy I was deflated. I didn’t curse, and I didn’t listen to music with cursing in it. Sure my church leaders could stomach the occasional ‘ass’ or ‘hell’, but this was more than my ears could handle. However, every time the song came on the radio, I guiltily listened with immense pleasure. Eventually I decided to make a version of the song I could listen to. I bought the music making app ‘djay’ for $0.99, and bought the clean version of Thrift Shop for $1.29 - a significant purchases for me at the time! But to my dismay, I could not find a way to mute the song while it was playing - I could only mix it with another iTunes track.

I searched for songs of silence to mix and what I found was numerous articles about the song 4’33” - a nearly completely mute track that was composed by a dude back in the 50s. Desperate to listen to Thrift Shop in a way that would still get me into heaven, I begrudgingly paid another $0.99 for literally nothing, and made my ultra-clean copy of ‘Thrift Shop’. And to this day, I still have a hard time performing the song at kareoke with the curse words included.

Organ2/ASLSP

The name John Cage stuck in my head because I would see the useless $0.99 track in my iTunes library, one of the single digit number of songs that I owned as a teenager. But over the years I started to see his name come up in online discussions of weird art. The one that stood out to me the most was Organ2/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible). This composition is meant to be played as the name suggests - as slow as possible.

Most instruments have limits to how slow they can play a piece. Flutists need to take a breath, Bagpipers need to eat food, and piano strings eventually stop vibrating. However a properly maintained pipe organ can create sound indefinitely - as long as it’s bellows keep pumping air.

An organ was built and installed in Halberstadt, Germany for a proposed 631 years. People have made pilgramages to the temple to see note changes, which only happen every few years. It’s quite humbling to think that whatever I am doing, there’s an organ in Germany that is playing the same song. It’s been playing almost as long as I’ve been alive, and if all goes to plan, will be playing after I die.

organ

As of this post, ORGAN2/ASLSP has been playing in Halberstadt for 23 years, 10 months and 6 days. You can check the current time here

One-upping John Cage

If I were recreating this project today, I would of course seek to beat the record of playing ASLSP even slower. To put my own spin on this project, I would make a collaborative instrument that is kept alive by millions of people around the world, rather than just a handful of dedicated music nerds in Germany. I can envision an app or website that plays ASLSP through the speakers of whatever device is connected to it. If there is not a single person in the world playing it, the song ends.

Of course this would require tremendous technical infrastructure, redundancies, and maintainers to keep the site up and running for over 600 years. Not to mention the dedication and collaboration of millions of strangers to keep the song going. But I truly believe it could be possible, and I can imagine a world where an open source website, and tens of generations of families keep a song going for nearly 1000 years.