When we think of a song’s tempo, we immediately associate it with the beats per minute (BPM). Play the first song on your favorite playlist and tap your foot along to the beat—one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four—those are the beats, which create the BPM. Most dance songs are somewhere around 120-130bpm, and ballads tend to fall in the 60-90bpm range. But BPM is only a measurement of tempo, a hard data point that does not reflect the piece’s emotion.
In the classical world, composers use Italian naming conventions for their pieces. These offer a generally accepted range of tempos and an emotional descriptor, which allows the conductor to arrange the performance in accordance to their own style. If you listen to multiple performances of Beethoven’s Symphony No.5, the performances will vary slightly in tempo and intensity. For this reason, conductor and symphony names are very important in the classical world.
There are dozens of Italian tempo markings, but a few examples are: allegro (fast, quickly, bright), marcia moderato (moderately, in the manner of a march), and lento (slowly). Allegro tells the conductor or performer more information about the piece than 120-156bpm, and it is always exciting to hear musicians push the conventional boundaries of a traditional piece of music.
In 1987, composer and philosopher John Cage published Organ²/ASLSP for organ. Cage omitted all tempo markings from the piece, save for the single note “As Slow as Possible.” By rejecting a specific BPM and convenient tempo markings like larghissimo, John Cage guaranteed that no two performances of Organ²/ASLSP would be the same. Even though the score is only 8 pages long, piano performances of the composition can last on average anywhere from 20 to 70 minutes, depending on the audience’s (and performer’s) patience.
The most famous performance of Organ²/ASLSP is currently happening in Germany, and will continue for the next 620 years. A conference of musicians and philosophers met in 1997 to discuss Cage’s mysterious sole instruction “As Slow as Possible” and debated how to properly homage the late composer’s piece. John Cage’s selection of the organ as the ideal instrument for Organ²/ASLSP was not a coincidence: a properly maintained pipe organ has an infinite decay rate, i.e. each note can have an infinite lifespan. With this in mind, the conference settled on a project to perform Organ²/ASLSP beginning in 2000, and lasting over 639 years—truly “As Slow as Possible.”
This seemingly random duration of 639 years was chosen to commemorate the first permanent organ installation in 1361, 639 years prior to the original start date of 2000.
The performance officially began on September 5th, 2001 in St. Buchardi Church in Halberstadt, Germany. This went largely unnoticed because the first note of the piece is a rest, so the organ was silent until the first chord was played on July 5th, 2005. Since then, there have been 14 total impulses, with people from around the world making pilgrimage to the church to hear the organ change notes. This year, after holding a single chord for 2527 days, the organ will shift on September 5th.
So book your flight now to experience a truly insane musical undertaking! Oh, wait, the EU might extend a travel ban on U.S. travelers due to our nation’s embarrassing response the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead of imposing strict lockdowns like other first world countries (Italy, Spain, Germany), the United States tried soft ‘suggestions’ to appease gun-toting protestors who were fighting for their freedom to die while shopping for discounts at Hobby Lobby.
Back to the conference of musicians and philosophers. I admire their enthusiasm to design and undertake a project so immense in scope, that it was guaranteed they would never live to experience its completion. They simply had to trust that future generations would carry on the torch and continue the project for over half a millennium.
I wish our elected leaders and fellow citizens in the U.S. understood this approach to societal change and evolution. Make no mistake, I am not advocating for incrementalism; as small steps cannot produce significant change under the rapid pace of modern society. I want to see our nation take on massive, transformative projects that guarantee a better world for future generations. Many of us will not live to see the climate crisis decimate the Earth, but we can mitigate the effects on our descendants by taking action now.
Just this week, Bloomberg published “Coronavirus Brings American Decline Out in the Open,” highlighting the failure of American infrastructure, health-care, and government when the pandemic struck. If we do not invest massively in our nation’s social capital, the author posits that the United States could resemble a developing nation and fall behind other wealthy nations like Germany, France, China, and Canada.
There is no tempo for legislation, but right now the United States needs the bravery to undertake an infrastructure project that will last for generations.
Once you’ve contemplated your mortality and listened to 15 excruciating seconds of Organ²/ASLSP, check out this week’s New Music Tuesday.
Mansions - Big Bad
Seattle-based Mansions returned last Friday with their first full-length album since their ear-shattering Doom Loop in 2013. Big Bad is similarly thick, but adopts a plodding pace and introspective lyrics. The album blooms and decays with each song, creating an internal rhythm for the album as a whole.
The Big Bad world sucks you in. You’re alone in a run-down motel with no memory of how you got there. The sounds around you feel like they’re playing inside your own head. Hazy synthesizers reel from cassette tapes. Reverb drips from old spring tanks. Pro wrestling pay-per-view drones in the background. The dust from a gravel parking lot blows in the door. Guitar bleeds from combo amps in from the next room over. Bass rumbles in the pit of your stomach. A champagne bottle breaks on the bathroom floor. Electric piano pulses and rings out indefinitely. The maid is knocking on the door. You start losing your sense of place. You're in the dark corner of a bar. You're in the trunk of a car. You're underwater. The sun is exploding. You're new again. You might be losing your hair. You need to weed the yard. It's a wonderful life, when the angle's just right.
Pairs Well With: watering plants after a long day, rain tapping at your window
Deeper - Auto-Pain
Chicago’s Deeper released their new album Auto-Pain in late March. The title is derived from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World:
Auto-Pain is a concept meant to be an inverse to soma, a pill in the book which makes everything numb. The idea of auto-pain is to epitomize the desire to return to a connection with thoughts and clarity, which comes at the expense of feeling everything simultaneously.
Sonically, Deeper is drawing a ton of influence from late the ‘70s post punk movement and bands like Joy Division, Public Image Ltd., and The Fall. In the words of the record producer from the I Think You Should Leave ‘Laser Spine Specialists’ sketch: “this is right in your q-zone!”
Pairs Well With: a healthy dose of nihilism
Varsity - Fine Forever
Another band from Chicago, Varsity vaguely occupies the power-pop lane in the grand spectrum of genres, but it defies strict categorization. Varsity levies light guitars punctuated with saxophone runs and infectious rhythms. Vocalist/keyboardist Stef Smith constructed these songs as an author would arrange a series of vignettes:
I used to be a documentary filmmaker, so narrative nonfiction is sort-of my view of the world. These songs are all different stories, and I relate to those stories, but I’m not the protagonist.
Pairs Well With: sunny afternoons, colorful sunsets