The organist Dominik Susteck plays John Cage's Organ²/ASLSP in a reading of about three quarters of an hour, and sets it next to two organ works by Toshio Hosokawa, Cloudscape and Sen IV. Three improvisations of his own, the Carillon pieces, link the two composers. The disc, listed on Discogs as Frozen Time, contains first recordings and was made in Cologne's Kunst-Station Sankt Peter.
Susteck, born in 1977, is closely tied to Sankt Peter, a Cologne church that has for more than two decades hosted contemporary art and new music and has an organ built for new music. The recording is a Deutschlandfunk production made within the forum neuer Musik 2015. In the three improvisations Susteck adds mobile MIDI instruments built by Gerhard Kern. Hosokawa, born in 1955, works with Japanese aesthetic principles, using Western and traditional Japanese instruments and bringing the sounds of the two traditions closer together.
Cage wrote ASLSP in 1985 as a piano piece and transcribed it for organ in 1987. The title stands for "As Slow aS Possible", and beyond that instruction the performer chooses tempo, registration and dynamics. Cage approached Japanese music through its roots in Zen Buddhism and its wish to imitate nature, and the freedom left to the player belongs to that thinking: the text can be adjusted to the performer's own inner state or rhythm. Here the eight pages unfold over eight tracks. Hosokawa's Cloudscape (2000) and Sen IV each last just under eight minutes, and they alternate with the Carillon improvisations.
Susteck's improvisations are conceived spatially. Sound moves literally through the building, and the sequence of impulses suggests different spaces and landscapes, with a clear sense of foreground and background. Cage's piece is best known for the performance in St. Burchardi in Halberstadt, which began on 5 September 2001 and is planned to last 639 years, a span chosen to commemorate the organ built in that town in 1361. Susteck's reading, by contrast, is complete within a single disc.
CD, Wergo WER 7368 2, released in 2017, a Deutschlandfunk production from the forum neuer Musik 2015.
