A 30-year love letter to L.A. with a final revelation

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Set us as preferred In an otherwise empty compartment of a regional train on its way to a small town in Germany last month, a friendly passenger asked if I was headed to Halberstadt for “the note change.” He was an Australian law professor based in Hong Kong who was traveling with his Swiss mother for the irregular ritual every few years of a new note being sounded on a decommissioned old church’s diminutive modern pipe organ in what feels like the middle of nowhere.He was hardly alone.The audience the next day in the packed late-Romanesque St.

Burchardi “John Cage Organ” Church had come from seemingly everywhere, along with international media, to witness a barely distinguishable new note added to a sustained chord in Cage’s “Organ2/ASLSP.”“ASLSP” stands for as “As Slow(ly) and Soft(ly) as Possible,” adapted from the opening line of the final paragraph in James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”: “Soft morning City! Lsp.” Cage had meant his organ piece to enjoy the indeterminacy of neither the performer nor the audience knowing how long the score, in eight parts, would last.In Halberstadt, they are stretching it out 639 years! The performance began in 2001 with the intent that each note change would be a great event.Four years ago, Times columnist Nicolas Goldberg wrote an opinion piece about his fascination with what to him sounded like a profound project about the meaning of time.

I tried to talk him out of what I believed to be a gimmicky violation of the being-in-the-moment spirit of Cage.But what mattered to Nick was the idea, not the intent, and he used me in his column as a foil.

Still, Cage has been central to my practicing what some people (not me) call music criticism, and I contended wild horses couldn’t drag me to Halberstadt.World & Nation A small organ in eastern Germany is the h...