Inside the St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany, sandbags rest on the pedals of a custom-built organ, holding a chord that has been sounding since 2001 as part of a performance scheduled to end in the year 2640. This episode traces how John Cage’s Organ2/ASLSP, an eight-page score written in 1987 for a Maryland piano competition with the instruction as slow as possible, became a 639-year mechanical and civic experiment.

The hosts explain why a 1997 German conference seized on the pipe organ’s ability to sustain a note indefinitely, how the 639-year span was derived from the first documented organ in Halberstadt Cathedral around 1361, and how the piece began with a year and a half of silence before the first chord in February 2003. They also cover the acrylic case built in 2011 to muffle the drone, the August 5, 2026 addition of an A4 pipe, the next scheduled change on October 5, 2027, and the parallel world of human endurance records, including Francesco Pio Generali’s 25-hour solo and an eight-day relay at Arizona State University.

• Why Cage wrote ASLSP as a mental break for competition judges and how organists first stretched it to about 90 minutes
• How Christoph Bossert and Rainer O. Neugebauer converted distances on the page into months and years of sound, mapped only through 2072
• Sponsoring a year of the performance as a fundraising strategy and separating the pipes from the bellows across the church transepts
• A 24-hour pipe organ record set in 2023 and Christopher Anderson’s 16-hour solo at SMU, complete with a wild-mushroom dinner in the dark honoring Cage
• Whether a note every few years can still be called a melody, and what the final silence in 2640 might mean