Nicholas Goldberg: This is the slowest concert ever. It began 21 years ago and is just getting started
I wanted to know more about the Halberstadt project, so I called Mark Swed, The Times’ classical music critic, who knew Cage before his death in 1992 and has written about him extensively. Swed is a huge Cage enthusiast, so I was intrigued to find that he is strongly — perhaps vehemently is more accurate — irked by the 639-year event.
Swed says Cage wrote music to be performed. And this is not a real performance. Not only can no performer play the piece — sandbags are the current organist — but the piece can’t be heard by an audience from beginning to end, for obvious reasons. What’s more, Swed says, Cage was all about freeing yourself from ego — but this is all about the ego of the town of Halberstadt, about attracting attention and reeling in tourists.
So it is really not surprising that there are people who think a 639-year concert would’ve been right down Cage’s alley.Are we really going to let the unappealing business term “high net worth individuals” replace “rich”? I hope not. But I can’t help it — this performance makes me smile. It’s a stunt, but it’s also a challenge to our drab human tendency to think only in terms of the ticking away of our own lives, the humdrum passing of our days, the hours and minutes of our own short existences.