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