As Slow As Possible

ROMAN MARS: This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars. When you go to a concert, you might try to get there right when the doors open. Or maybe you take your time and skip the opening act. But generally, you want to be there when the show starts. In February, everyone who went to a concert in Halberstadt, Germany, showed up 23 years late.

 GABE BULLARD (FIELD TAPE): Alright, getting ready to head to the train station.

ROMAN MARS: One of those late comers was Gabe Bullard. Gabe’s a reporter living in Basel, Switzerland. So, he took the train a few hours into Germany to a pretty rural part of the country.

GABE BULLARD: Halberstadt is an old medieval town, like what you’d expect from a storybook. There are timber frame houses packed close together–curving cobblestone streets–but there wasn’t time for sightseeing. The concert was well underway.

ROMAN MARS: And Gabe was planning to leave early because, from this concert, everyone walks out early.

GABE BULLARD: It’s a performance of a piece called ORGAN²/ASLSP. “ASLP” stands for “As Slow As Possible,” which is how the composer meant for it to be played. And that’s how it is being played–very slowly. And the reason I came all the way to Halberstadt now is because this was no ordinary day of the performance. I came to see a chord change.

ROMAN MARS: The last time ORGAN²/ASLSP had a chord change was 2022. And this new chord will play until the next change in August of 2026. There’s a change the year after that and the year after that and so on until the year 2640. The full performance is meant to last 639 years.

 GABE BULLARD (FIELD TAPE): Walking up to the concert. Looks like this is it. Going to walk in.

GABE BULLARD: The performance is in the church of a nun’s cloister, founded in the 13th century. It’s an old building with bare stone walls, a floor that’s mostly gravel, and a wood roof. When I went in, there were a few people looking at what I realized was the organ. But it didn’t look like a typical organ.

 GABE BULLARD (FIELD TAPE): In the middle of the room here, there’s a wooden structure with two kind of towers and then some metal pipes coming out of it. And they are making the sound. Those pipes are making the sound that is filling this room. One sound.

ROMAN MARS: And that’s it. That’s the performance. Well, at least until the chord change, at which point the organ will play a different one sound.

GABE BULLARD: Over the last 23 years, this tiny pipe organ playing this loud drone has drawn in thousands of fans, especially during chord changes. And as unassuming and discordant as it is, it tends to keep people drawn in once they hear it.

ROMAN MARS: There are people who come for every change, often traveling from thousands of miles away–people who will stay in the church all day, just listening–people whom ORGAN²/ASLSP literally brings to tears.

GABE BULLARD: I came to Halberstadt to find out why–as in, why does ORGAN²/ASLSP even exist in the first place? And what is it that so mesmerizes people about being in a cold, crumbling building listening to this?

ROMAN MARS: The artist behind this very, very slow performance was John Cage. Cage was an American composer who started his career in the 1930s with well-received instrumental compositions like In a Landscape, from 1948.

GABE BULLARD: Cage’s compositions could be complex and modern, but they didn’t always push boundaries. That changed in the 1950s when he began experimenting not with the sound of music but with the idea of music.

ROMAN MARS: His most famous piece is probably 4’33”, during which the performer is supposed to sit silent for four minutes and 33 seconds while the audience listens to whatever sounds are in the room: the air conditioner humming, other people shuffling uncomfortably, the traffic passing by outside…

JOHN CAGE: I love the activity of sound.

ROMAN MARS: Here he is talking about it in 1991.

JOHN CAGE: If you listen to Beethoven or to Mozart, you see that they’re always the same. But if you listen to traffic, you see it’s always different.

GABE BULLARD: You can read all sorts of meaning into Cage’s work. It’s supposed to make us think about silence or randomness, or maybe it’s not really supposed to make us think much at all. In an interview, Cage quoted the philosopher Emmanuel Kant…

JOHN CAGE: There are two things that don’t have to mean anything. One is music, and the other is laughter. Don’t have to mean anything–that is–in order to give us very deep pleasure.

ROMAN MARS: In 1985, Cage experimented with time and wrote the first iteration of ASLSP with the explicit instruction to try to play it as slowly as possible. Here’s one of the early attempts.

GABE BULLARD: Now, if you’re thinking that the letters ASLSP don’t really correspond to the words as slow as possible, Cage is one step ahead of you. The title is also a reference to a line in James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake. The line is: “Soft morning, city. Lsp!” where “lisp” is just spelled “lsp.” What that has to do with the music isn’t really clear.

ROMAN MARS: But as more musicians began to take an interest in ASLSP, very soon performers trying to follow Cage’s instructions hit a wall. Cage wrote this first iteration to be performed on piano, but there’s a physical limit to how long a note can sound on a piano. You press a key, a hammer strikes a string, but the string will eventually stop vibrating.

GABE BULLARD: So, the first performances of ASLSP lasted between 10 and 20 minutes, which is pretty long for a song–just not long, long.

ROMAN MARS: Performers were stymied. They wanted a way to play ASLSP slower–much slower–than was possible on a piano. But then, in 1987, Cage reworked the music for an instrument that didn’t have any such limitations.

GABE BULLARD: That’s Claus-Erhard Heinrich playing. He’s on the board of trustees for the project that brought cages ASLSP to Halberstadt. And he’s director of music for the Halberstadt Cathedral, whose organ you’re hearing. It’s across town from the Cage project, and it’s where I went to understand why the pipe organ is the perfect instrument for a performance that needs to last a very long time. The cathedral’s organ is on a big stone balcony that rises above the main floor. To get there, we went through a wooden door and up twisting, stone stairs with uneven grooves that have worn in over the centuries. At the top, Claus-Erhard and I were in a stone area lit by the moonlight coming in from a gigantic ornate window.

 GABE BULLARD (FIELD TAPE): Oh wow. We’re inside the organ here.

CLAUS-ERHARD HEINRICH: Impressive side. You can look down.

GABE BULLARD: This was my first time being inside a working pipe organ. And my first thought was that the name, “organ,” fits. Like a bodily organ, a pipe organ is an intricate system. And this system is all about moving air and only air.

ROMAN MARS: Which is also the reason an organ can play much, much longer notes than a piano. Its sound doesn’t come from a vibrating string. It comes from airflow.

GABE BULLARD: The air is drawn from whatever space the organ happens to be in. In this case, it came from inside the cathedral itself. Claus-Erhard showed me an opening with a screen over it.

CLAUS-ERHARD HEINRICH: That’s to prevent birds from going in and not coming out again. Sometimes they let them fall. And then they are inside, and they die.

GABE BULLARD: From the cathedral’s interior, the air goes into the organ through the bellows. These are basically big pumps. In the old days, bellows had to be manually pushed–sometimes by people standing on them and working them like a big, medieval StairMaster. But in modern organs, like the one I was climbing around in, the process has been electrified. Claus-Erhard went over to turn on a switch.

CLAUS-ERHARD HEINRICH: Now, you see there’s no air…

 GABE BULLARD (FIELD TAPE): They’re rising.

CLAUS-ERHARD HEINRICH: Yeah.

GABE BULLARD: From the bellows, we passed through another door into a room full of pipes standing in orderly rows. Then we went up a series of increasingly narrow ladders and stairs, climbing higher and higher into more rooms with more pipes. Some were wider than a bowling ball, while others were barely bigger than a pencil.

ROMAN MARS: The way the air from the bellows becomes music is by passing through these pipes. Every pipe is tuned to a note–A, B flat, C sharp, and so on. But each pipe also has its own voice based on how it’s made. It could be big and brassy or thin and reedy.

GABE BULLARD: An organist decides which voices to use by opening or closing what are called “stops.” If the stop for the big, brassy pipes is open, that’s what the organ will sound like.

ROMAN MARS: And an organist doesn’t need to choose only one stop. Multiple stops can be open all at once. So, a single press of a key sends air through multiple pipes. This is where we get the phrase “pulling out all the stops.”

GABE BULLARD: I asked Claus-Erhard if he could pull out all the stops for a single key.

 GABE BULLARD (FIELD TAPE): Can you just walk me through one note as the stops open and what the sound is?

CLAUS-ERHARD HEINRICH: Well, one stop after the other?

 GABE BULLARD (FIELD TAPE): Yeah, add each one.

CLAUS-ERHARD HEINRICH: For instance… And so on. And for instance, I can couple them…

 GABE BULLARD (FIELD TAPE): That’s amazing.

CLAUS-ERHARD HEINRICH: Yeah.

ROMAN MARS: As long as there’s an open stop, a press key, and a flow of air, an organ can play a note like this indefinitely.

GABE BULLARD: So, back in 1987, when Cage rewrote ASLSP specifically for the organ, his instruction to play it as slow as possible took on a whole new meaning.

ROMAN MARS: Cage died in 1992. But six years later, musicologists and philosophers met at a conference in Germany to determine what was the best way to play ASLSP really slowly on an organ and how long could you possibly play it for?

RAINER NEUGEBAUER: And they made something… In Germany, we call it “brainstorm.”

GABE BULLARD: Rainer Neugebauer is the chair of the board of trustees for the John Cage Organ Project. He says that the conference attendees had some very different opinions, like whether the organist playing ASLSP could or should stay at the organ.

RAINER NEUGEBAUER: And one said, “Oh, the organist must go to the loo or eat something.” And then one religious theologian would say, “No, no, the organist must play until he dies–dead from the seat.” So, it was a lifetime of an organist.

GABE BULLARD: Rainer says these ideas weren’t quite right because an organist can only play a piece for so long. But the music doesn’t say that a person has to be the one playing it.

RAINER NEUGEBAUER: You need not all the time an organist; you can fix the keys.

GABE BULLARD: In other words, you could find a way to keep the keys depressed so there’s always a flow of air–no organist needed. With this approach, the only theoretical limit would be the lifespan of the organ itself.

RAINER NEUGEBAUER: So, when the organ breaks down, the music is over.

ROMAN MARS: Out of this debate came an idea to play a very long rendition of ORGAN²/ASLSP on an organ made specifically for the performance. The philosophers, theologians, and musicologists also needed a place to host this indefinite concert, and they landed on Halberstadt.

GABE BULLARD: Halberstadt was, in many ways, the perfect choice. It might not seem like it, but–in the world of pipe organs–this rural German town of 40,000 people is kind of a big deal. In restaurants and hotels, I kept seeing brochures that call Halberstadt “Orgel Stadt.” “Organ City.” On the back, there was a map to eight different pipe organs around town.

ROMAN MARS: That’s roughly one pipe organ for every 5,000 people.

GABE BULLARD: And the project’s organizers knew about an old church in a nun’s cloister called St. Burchardi that would be perfect for the performance. By 1998, the church wasn’t in good shape. It had been used for just about everything but religious services since the early 19th century. It was storage, a brewery, a barn for pigs…

ROMAN MARS: The city agreed to hand over the church to the project, but the performance was far from ready.

ANNELI BORGMAN: We had the location. And then we had to think about how long do we play.

GABE BULLARD: Anneli Borgman is another member of the board of the Cage Project along with Claus-Erhard Heinrich. And she says that figuring out how long to play isn’t as easy as saying, “Play until the organ falls apart.” ASLSP is written as sheet music. It has a beginning and an end. You have to have some kind of tempo if you’re actually going to play it. So, the foundation looked back into Halberdstadt’s history with organs.

ANNELI BORGMAN: We have so many churches and, of course, so many organs and also organ history.

GABE BULLARD: That history had begun in the 14th century with the installation of an organ in the town cathedral. And so, someone suggested, “Hey, exactly how long ago did the town’s cathedral get its old organ? Let’s play the piece for that long.”

ROMAN MARS: Which came out to 639 years.

GABE BULLARD: And so, on John Cage’s birthday, September 5th, 2001, Rainer and the other members of the foundation gathered in St. Burchardi and began their 639 year journey–with a rest.

ANNELI BORGMAN: At the beginning, there were just the bellows because the piece starts with the break. And so, you just heard for 17 months just the bellows.

GABE BULLARD: The bellows for the cage organ are in the back of the church, in a wood structure about the size of a small car. They have a backup motor that keeps them going. And they haven’t ever stopped pumping air, even if that air doesn’t go through any pipes and just vents out into the church. After that first day, if you went to see the performance, that’s what you’d hear–just the sound of air moving through this contraption.

ROMAN MARS: You could say that this was the “Soft morning, city. Lsp!” referenced in the piece’s title. It was all very Cage-ian.

GABE BULLARD: The organ’s design was similarly notable for what’s not there. There’s no piano-style keyboard or switches to open or close stops. The only controls are three small, wooden keys on the front with tiny sandbags holding them down to keep the air moving through the pipes, which sit in a spare, wooden frame. To make different notes, the foundation members replaced the pipes, putting new ones into open slots and taking old ones out.

ROMAN MARS: Certain upcoming sections of the composition may require more pipes than the organ can currently fit. But because this is as slow as possible, Anneli Borgman says that the question isn’t urgent.

ANNELI BORGMAN: This is the question of people after us because the first part is ending in 2072. So, I am a hundred years old then. And I think they will–I don’t know–perhaps in 2060, discuss how to go further on.

ROMAN MARS: And it won’t be the first time the piece has needed some adjustments. You might think that with only one note to play every couple of years, what could possibly go wrong? Well, it turns out a lot.

RAINER NEUGEBAUER: The first chord change was on the wrong date.

GABE BULLARD: Early on, a reporter did some calculations and realized the project had gotten the math wrong. He told Rainer that the 17 months of bellows blasting at the beginning should have been 28 months if the piece was to truly last until 2640.

ROMAN MARS: The slowest possible performance was moving too fast.

RAINER NEUGEBAUER: So, now where can we catch the 11 months? So, because we are Germans and Germans had the idea, when I make a work and when I end the work, it must be correct.

GABE BULLARD: The group postponed the next chord change to make up the time, and now the piece is back on schedule. But that wasn’t the only problem when the project got going. The first chord to play after the 17 months of rest was also too loud.

RAINER NEUGEBAUER: And it was a very disharmonic tone. And when a car was broken or broken–it sounded a little bit like this. And there was people who heard it and they go to the police and said, “We can’t sleep.”

GABE BULLARD: But you can’t just turn a pipe organ down. The sound comes from air moving through pipes. There’s no volume knob.

ROMAN MARS: So, for almost 10 years, they had to put the organ underneath an ugly plexiglass box, which warped the sound. Then in 2011, they brought in two new bass pipes. The new pipes plus some adjustments to the bellows made the organ quieter.

GABE BULLARD: Two neighbors I spoke with–Joachim and Margit Trübe–say that today they can’t hear the organ at all. It’s too quiet. I asked what they think of it. And Joachim said that it doesn’t really have a deep meaning to him. “You have to be an artist or a music lover to understand it,” he said, which I guess he was not.

ROMAN MARS: But one thing Joachim does notice is that the organ brings in tourists. “The project is good,” he says.

JOACHIM TRÜBE: The project is good.

GABE BULLARD: The morning of the cord change, the cloister’s courtyard filled up a few hours before the big event. Uta Percy was sitting next to the church, sheltering from the wind. She’d come from Hamburg.

 GABE BULLARD (FIELD TAPE): You’re out in the cold and the wind waiting to get in?

UTA PERCY: I’ve got my coffee. No problem.

 GABE BULLARD (FIELD TAPE): It seems pretty dedicated.

UTA PERCY: I take a day off–holidays.

 GABE BULLARD (FIELD TAPE): You’re on vacation? You took a holiday from work?

GABE BULLARD: Some people made even more of a trip out of the chord change, even if they didn’t know much about experimental music, like Albert Xie and Peter Zhi, who were on their first trip to Europe.

ALBERT XIE: Well, I came here from Victoria, BC.

 GABE BULLARD (FIELD TAPE): Oh, wow.

PETER ZHI: I’m from New York.

 GABE BULLARD (FIELD TAPE): And you flew in just for this?

ALBERT XIE: Kind of. Yeah. This is a good excuse to come to Europe.

PETER ZHI: It’s the highlight.

ALBERT XIE: Yeah, it’s the highlight.

 GABE BULLARD (FIELD TAPE): Are you big Cage fans?

PETER ZHI: We have never heard anything by Cage.

ALBERT XIE: Yeah.

GABE BULLARD: About 500 people showed up. And as the change approached, the church doors opened. We packed inside the church, which was quite cold. Rainer and a few others walked in and gathered in front of the organ, next to a music stand displaying the score with lines marking each month of the performance. Another board member began to speak. As the audience settled in, the speaker asked for a few minutes of silence.

SPEAKER: For the next five minutes we will listen to the sounds. Please be quiet. Just relax and listen…

GABE BULLARD: It was eerie. I was surrounded by hundreds of people–no one making a sound–as we just listened to the unchanging drone. Then wearing white gloves, Rainer approached the organ carrying a new pipe tuned to D natural. As he lowered it into an opening in the organ, we could hear the air start to move and the entire organ adjust to the change. We stayed still for two more minutes, all of us surrounded by this new sound. Then jubilation. After the applause, the crowd broke up and people walked around the church. A lot of them worked their way up to the rope barrier around the organ, looking on with reverence and big smiles. I noticed someone crying. It was Aletta Jaecker with the Cage project. She had handed Rainer the new pipe.

ALETTA JAECKER: My role was only to bring him the organ pipe so he could put it in. So, that was my part in it.

 GABE BULLARD (FIELD TAPE): How did it feel?

ALETTA JAECKER: Crazy. It was so emotional. Yeah. It’s only an organ pipe, but it’s quite emotional actually. Yeah.

 GABE BULLARD (FIELD TAPE): What gives it such weight?

ALETTA JAECKER: You listen to this for about two years, and now you say goodbye to a sound.

GABE BULLARD: Outside, it was kind of like a music festival. People were hanging out–sitting on the grass. And some were making plans to come for the next chord change, including Ettore Bartolini.

 GABE BULLARD (FIELD TAPE): And what’d you think?

 ETTORE BARTOLINI: No thoughts.

Speaker 12: No impression or anything?

 ETTORE BARTOLINI: I think the matter is quite self-evident.

GABE BULLARD: I met some scouts who had a tradition of hiking to Halberstadt for chord changes. Another group was making a documentary about the project that won’t be done until the Organ concert ends. They plan to pass the unfinished work from generation to generation for centuries.

ROMAN MARS: But even for the most devoted, there’s only so much time you can spend with the organ. Rainer Neugebauerr is 70. He spent almost a third of his life with the concert. And he says that it takes a lot of busy, frantic, not slow as possible activity to keep As Slow As Possible going.

GABE BULLARD: Between giving tours, managing volunteers, raising money, promoting the performance, and just checking in on the organ, ORGAN²/ASLSP is actually a lot of work. Now, Rainer is thinking of stepping back, which to him means embracing the uncertainty of the project.

 GABE BULLARD (FIELD TAPE): Do you think it’ll make it all 639 years?

RAINER NEUGEBAUER: This is a very hard question. You must say we don’t know it. Maybe in 500 years it’s too hot here that no more people live here. In the last 20 years, we have had–four times–big holes in the roof from heavy storms. Maybe one of the dictators who have the nuclear power will smash an atom bomb. Maybe there are no people who are interested in it. I don’t know. This is a serious answer.

ROMAN MARS: Currently, the biggest threat is funding. It costs about 60,000 euros a year to run the organ, plus all the hours of volunteers. There are plaques along the wall of the church where people have sponsored years of the performance. And the foundation is planning to pre-sell tickets to the final performance, which will be passed down to future generations. The cost? 2,640 euros, as in the year the concert will end. And there are plans to host events and other projects at the cloister to generate not only revenue but more volunteers who will keep this going.

GABE BULLARD: One of those volunteers is Anneli Borgman, who joined the project four years ago. She’s planning to get even more involved in the coming decades.

ANNELI BORGMAN: But we will get a really busy year in 2034–we will have three chord changes. So, we have really a hectic period then. Yeah.

 GABE BULLARD (FIELD TAPE): Yeah. It’ll be moving pretty fast at that point compared to… Do you find humor in the project as well?

ANNELI BORGMAN: Of course. I think it’s really okay if somebody thinks that that’s a joke. For every person, it’s a different project. So yeah, for me it’s a serious project, but I can also smile about it. For example, I get a smile when I’m in the church and a bird is coming in the church. It’s wonderful, and it’s also funny.

ROMAN MARS: And–I kid you not–the Germans have a word for that feeling.

ANNELI BORGMAN: In German, you say “verruckt”–a crazy idea. And in German, there’s a double meaning. On one hand, it’s crazy. And on the other hand, it’s moved.

GABE BULLARD: “Moved” as in to move something to the side–to set it off–to follow its own beat.

ROMAN MARS: Even if that beat is extremely slow.

GABE BULLARD: After three days in Halberstadt, I went back to see the organ alone. All the earlier excitement around the chord change had been just a blip in the life of the performance. Now, as it is most of the time, the organ was just in the church by itself with no crowds, no TV cameras, and no tourists. I walked around the church, listening to the ways the pipes interact with each other and with the walls and floor–how the performance changed as I moved. It was more discordant in some places–more like one even tone in others. I went to the corner where Rainer recommended I stand.

 GABE BULLARD (FIELD TAPE): There’s this open space here. The sound is really… You can hear different overtones coming through. It doesn’t sound especially like it’s coming from the organ. It seems like it’s almost coming out of the walls.

GABE BULLARD: I started to feel almost giddy–overwhelmed not just by the sound but by the idea of the project going on for centuries in this same place. If all goes according to plan, it’ll play long after I’m dead. It was haunting and unsettling but then kind of peaceful. Then it was funny again. Verruckt.

 GABE BULLARD (FIELD TAPE): I’m looking at an organ playing a chord for two and a half years out of 639 years. What am I doing here? I don’t know. I like knowing that it’s here. Later, I thought back to that old archival interview with John Cage.

JOHN CAGE: When I talk about music, it finally comes to people’s minds that I’m talking about sound that doesn’t mean anything. And they say, “Mou mean it’s just sounds?” thinking that for something to just be a sound is to be useless. Whereas I love sounds just as they are, and I have no need for them to be anything more. I just want it to be a sound.

ROMAN MARS: When we come back, we’ll explore a different contribution Halberstadt has made to music history, 663 years in the past. Stick around. So, we’re back with Gabe Bullard. And, Gabe, you mentioned in the story that Halberstadt got a pipe organ in 1361. And apparently that organ has a more significant role in music history than just inspiring this very, very long organ concert.

GABE BULLARD: Yeah, so the records from the 14th century aren’t exactly great. But historians have reason to think that Halberstadt’s organ played an important role in the creation of the standard Western piano keyboard that we’re so familiar with today.

ROMAN MARS: Okay, interesting. Tell me a little bit more.

GABE BULLARD: I will! But first, I want to give you a sense of what pipe organs in the 14th century were like because they were played a little differently from the modern pipe organ. When I talked to Claus-Erhard Heinrich–the music director at the Halberstadt Cathedral–he told me some of the old organs were really hard to play. And apologies because, in this clip, you’ll see Claus-Erhard’s English and my German didn’t quite meet in the middle.

ROMAN MARS: Okay, we’ll muddle through.

CLAUS-ERHARD HEINRICH: You couldn’t play fast. It was very heavy.

 GABE BULLARD (FIELD TAPE): What were they doing? How were they playing?

CLAUS-ERHARD HEINRICH: Originally, you had to–in Latin–tractare. To beat. But it was very heavy.

 GABE BULLARD (FIELD TAPE): What was it that people were hitting? It wasn’t like a key?

CLAUS-ERHARD HEINRICH: No, it was… These were schale. If you eat something, you have.you have…

 GABE BULLARD (FIELD TAPE): Oh, a plate?

CLAUS-ERHARD HEINRICH: A very great spoon. And you could beat with a fist.

GABE BULLARD: And so, to translate what Claus-Erhard meant by “a very great spoon” was basically a bowl.

ROMAN MARS: Okay. So, if I’m understanding correctly, instead of keys as we know them, they were, like, these hand-sized bowls that people hit down with their fists?

GABE BULLARD: Yeah, they would hit ’em down and hold them down with their whole hand.

ROMAN MARS: I mean, given that limitation and the sort of strength to play the organ, I’m amazed organ’s caught on at all.

GABE BULLARD: Yeah, me too. But the big thing with these early organs is that whatever size the keys were, they weren’t laid out the same from organ to organ.

ROMAN MARS: How so?

GABE BULLARD: If you picture what you would see today when you sit down at almost any piano or organ or synthesizer, you’re almost certainly seeing your standard 12 keys–seven white and five black–and that represents an octave.

ROMAN MARS: Right. And so, when we talk about going up or down an octave, we’re talking about doubling or halving the frequency of the sound. That part is just physics. That’s always been true. And so, the pattern of 12 keys representing one octave just repeats as your hands move to higher or lower octaves on the keyboard.

GABE BULLARD: Correct. And these 12 keys on the keyboard are even reflected in the way we write music, using a scale with 12 half steps. A, A sharp, B, C, C sharp–all the way back to A a full octave higher. 12 keys playing 12 tones. But the thing is, it’s not actually necessary to divide the octave into 12 tones like this. And for much of Western history, we didn’t.

ROMAN MARS: So, what were the other ways that you could divide up an octave?

GABE BULLARD: 12 was just one of many. An instrument could have fewer notes per octave. It could have more notes. It could have notes that didn’t go up by a half step. There are centuries of mathematicians dividing up the octave differently. And just to give you two quick examples, here’s something called the ancient Greek Enharmonic scale, which was likely developed somewhere around 600 BCE. And here’s another ancient Greek scale.

ROMAN MARS: And so what makes those scales sound so different?

GABE BULLARD: With that first Enharmonic scale, there are notes that are in between the notes on your standard piano keyboard. Like, they would sit between the C and the C sharp. And so, your ear might not be used to them, but they’ve kind of been waiting around for us to listen to or to hear them for 2,500 years.

ROMAN MARS: I mean, that is so cool. I love that–that 2,500 years ago, Western music could be built out of such different component parts and sound so different from the music of today.

GABE BULLARD: It’s pretty cool. And that’s how things were well through the Middle Ages. Musicians and instrument makers divided up the octaves using different scales. But then, in the year 1361, Halberstadt got its organ.

ROMAN MARS: Okay. I think I see where this is going.

GABE BULLARD: And I’m going to make you go there anyway because I am now going to show you an old drawing that depicts what the keys on that first Halberstadt organ looked like.

ROMAN MARS: Okay. So, these are the really big and bulbous bowl paddles that you have to pound down with your fist. But what’s uncanny is that it really looks like a modern piano key layout. There’s a big row of keys and smaller ones in between. You can totally see that these are the white keys and these are the black keys. And for all intents and purposes, that looks like a present-day, Western keyboard.

GABE BULLARD: Exactly, yeah. And it’s believed this is the first example of a keyboard like this. And to be clear, records are very spotty. This drawing is from more than 200 years later. And while people had divided the octave into 12 notes before, this is what a lot of writers say was the first big church organ to organize the keys this way. And it played a big role in the layout becoming the standard in Western music as more and more instruments were built like this–with just 12 tones.

ROMAN MARS: And that’s why almost all classical music is built around those 12 notes.

GABE BULLARD: Yeah. And one thing Claus-Erhard told me too is that there was this kind of push and pull between organ makers and musicians. Composers could push the limits of what an organ could do. But unless organ makers changed their instruments, then the music had to fit what could physically be played.

ROMAN MARS: Right. And I suppose that, when you think about the most familiar music notation too, all the staffs, the sharps, the flat symbols–they’re indicating those 12 notes.

GABE BULLARD: Exactly. Now, it should be said that there are some good underlying reasons why the 12-note system eventually became the dominant format. Dividing an octave by 12 makes harmonies and chords a lot easier to find and play. But on the other hand, the big downside is that the dominance of 12 notes ended up limiting the kind of music that could be made. Halberstadt’s keyboard was saying that, of all the notes inside an octave, you only have 12 to choose from. And so throughout the years, this has generated pushback.

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, I can imagine. So, who pushed back and how did they push back?

GABE BULLARD: So, that ancient Greek scale we heard earlier was from a 1958 documentary on the late music theorist and composer, Harry Partch. And Partch was not a huge fan of the Halberstadt 12-tone limitation. In a book in 1949, he coined a phrase that I heard a lot of people in Halberstadt say when I was reporting this story.

RAINER NEUGEBAUER: “The Fatal Day of Halberstadt.”

GABE BULLARD: Partch called it “The Fatal Day of Halberstadt” because it would eventually lead to that keyboard and then those tones being locked in for Western music and the other potential scales and tones kind of fading away. And Partch wanted to recover those old tones.

ROMAN MARS: And so, what does that mean? Did he just want to resurrect other scales that had fallen out of disuse, like the ancient Greek one? Or did he want to create entirely new scales?

GABE BULLARD: Both.

ROMAN MARS: I like Harry Partch. Okay.

GABE BULLARD: Yeah. He said that we should question the ideas that physical instruments lock us into. So, he built instruments that could play different intervals. And the math behind how to do this gets pretty strange, but he came up with a scale that had 43 notes. Here he is playing it on an instrument he made called a Chromelodeon.

HARRY PARTCH: Here is the scale on my Chromelodeon and adapted reed organ.

ROMAN MARS: That makes me feel incredibly tense. Oh my goodness. Harry Partch. Okay. But up to this point, we’ve been focusing just on Western music. And I’ve heard plenty of music from different cultures where 12 tones isn’t the standard and hasn’t always been the standard.

GABE BULLARD: Oh, definitely. A lot of Middle Eastern music uses up to 24 tones. And in a lot of places outside the influence of the Halberstadt organ, scales and instruments have historically been played differently. And I should say, we hear these in-between tones–sometimes called microtones–all the time now, even in Western music. I’m looking at a guitar here in the corner of my office, and the neck has frets that divide the octave into 12 notes. But you can bend strings, and that can make the blue note that makes the blues so distinct. And sometimes a singer like Mariah Carey might do a big vocal run in a pop song. Or there’s that opening bass slide in These Boots are Made for Walkin’. Not everything fits that 12-note system, and people find ways around it.

ROMAN MARS: Well, Gabe, this has been so fascinating and fun. Thank you so much for sharing all this.

GABE BULLARD: Thank you, Roman. It’s been a pleasure.

ROMAN MARS: 99% Invisible was reported this week by Gabe Bullard, and edited by Joe Rosenberg. With additional editing by Kelly Prime. Mix by Martín Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real. Fact-checking by Sona Akavian. And special thanks this week to Linda Golden. Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. Nikita Apte is our intern. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jayson De Leon, Emmett FitzGerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Gabriella Gladney, Kelly Prime, Jeyca Maldonado-Medina, Neena Pathak, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM Podcast Family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building… in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California. You can find us on all the usual social media sites, as well as our new Discord server. And if you want to find out more about Halberstadt’s Cage Project or its accompanying 639-year-long documentary, there are links to all that, as well as every past episode of 99PI, at 99pi.org.