Open Questions

As the donor plaque 2085 anticipates: "WE DID IT OUR WAY":

What would Cage have said about the Halberstadt project? At best, we can speculate. Cage – always radical, never consistent – responded to the accusation that his pieces were too long by stating that he considered his famous silent piece 4'33'' (Four Minutes 33 Seconds), with its three movements titled "Tacet," to be a "very long performance." However: Are hundreds of years not too long even for ASLSP? Is it, according to Gerd Zacher, just a joke about a century-long performance?

The post- and specialist world argues ambitiously about these and other questions. Is the artistic approach a bit poor? How exactly are the timings of the sound changes calculated? Shouldn't the sound changes themselves be stretched out as much as the sounds? Was it allowed to simply end the "pause" with which the piece begins? Can an incomplete, provisional organ be used to begin a performance at all? What if we played too fast out of impatience and are 11 months ahead of schedule? Can this later be compensated by playing slower? What then does "slower than 'as slow as possible'" mean? What if the concert is interrupted because the bellows fails? Who are the musicians in this concert, anyway? Is it even a concert if there are often no listeners present? Every evening, when the last visitors have left, it says: "Close the church door and open up to all questions!" Cage would have been delighted, he loved questions: "That is a very good question. I should not want to spoil it with an answer."

In 2006, the New York Times found something typically German about this project, namely that it is still there. And that is not self-evident, because money is tight for ambitious and avant-garde art and culture. The project is supported by a private foundation that is equipped with minimal capital and is run purely on a voluntary basis. It survives primarily due to the willingness of Cage enthusiasts, private sponsors, and many visitors to make a donation. A John Cage Academy with  founding president, Dieter Schnebel, is being set up. Many concerts, readings, exhibitions, seminars in cooperation with music universities at home and abroad, master classes with the awarding of the Cage Prize, as well as scientific conferences with international participation are highly regarded preparatory work.

For some, a musical apple tree was planted in St. Burchardi, for others it is a musical message in a bottle based on the idea of an American anarchist who was close to Zen Buddhism. ORGAN²/ASLSP is a simultaneously radical, annoying, open, and extremely gentle art project, " ... it goes beyond human wit ... the human eye has not heard it, the human ear has not seen it." A dream so strangely instigated. A former monastery church as a sound/dream space that reveals more than 639 years of history and is filled with the power of Ernst Bloch's hope for more than 639 years of future.