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639 Years in a Single Chord

On Wednesday, 5 August 2026, it happened again: a chord in John Cage’s Organ2/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible) changed after two and a half years. Classic FM reports.

The work was written by the American avant-garde composer John Cage in the mid-1980s. The score consists of eight pages of music, and, as the title suggests, the instruction is to play it »as slow as possible.«

On piano, the work can last around an hour. But on organ, Cage’s idea of slowness can unfold on an entirely different timescale. In the most extreme performance, the work lasts not hours or days, but 639 years.

Since 2001, Organ2/ASLSP has been performed at St Burchardi Church in Halberstadt, Germany. A specially built organ has been installed for the project, and the performance is scheduled to continue until the year 2640.

This means that individual chords can sound for years at a time. When a change finally occurs, it therefore becomes an event in itself. The latest chord change took place on 5 August 2026 – two and a half years after the previous one.

The project began symbolically on Cage’s 89th birthday in 2001 and will continue long after all the people experiencing it today are gone. No audience member can hear the work from beginning to end. They can only arrive at a particular moment and hear the fragment of its 639-year duration that happens to unfold before them.

Source: Classic FM, 5 August 2026

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The Trombone Finds Its Lyrical Side

Francisco Coll: »Tapias«

Stavanger Concert Hall, 17.09.26

Andrew Mellor

At 19, the Spanish composer (and trombonist) Francisco Coll wrote a wild-child of a trombone concerto that pushed the instrument out of its comfort zone. 22 years later he has created a new piece from some of that material. Its priorities are the opposite.

Tapias embraces the lyrical, ethereal qualities of the trombone. It is not a concerto, insists Coll. Perhaps it could be described as a set of frescoes for trombone and orchestra. Whatever the category, it’s a beguiling piece that was gorgeously birthed on Thursday by Ian Bousfield, conductor Nuno Coelho and a sumptuous-sounding Stavanger Symphony Orchestra.

Composers from Sibelius to Turnage have reacted against caricatures of the trombone as brusque and clowning by exploring its dark-hued lyricism. Coll does something more, setting his soloist’s introspective, intervallic melodies in evocative and provocative orchestral contexts. The soloist’s lines can resemble spray-canned tracings on walls already heavy with the patina of history, decoration and graffiti.

Initially the trombone appears to seek repose. The second movement draws it into more agility but the dancing is suppressed: a layered burying of all manner of rhythms from flamenco to Hiphop. Great wodges of rich harmony weigh the boogying down for good.

The trombone does find peace in the final movement – its long, soulful melodies more yielding. But not before Coll has conjured up moments of huge harmonic strain and conscious orchestral magnificence. They sat well next to Coelho’s fierce performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No 5 after the interval. But Bousfield’s heartfelt journey through Tapias, sounding entirely at one with the orchestra, will linger longest in the mind.

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