Music with the slowest tempos

[greg]

Here I am, listening to Levine conduct the Adagio of Mahler 9, and thinking, "this is possibly the slowest tempo I have ever heard in my life."

I haven't calculated exactly, but I'd estimate a tempo of ~30 something bpm for much of it, and at the end, dropping down to, maybe, ~20 bpm. That's nearly one beat every 3 seconds.

Just looked at several Feldman scores, and the closest I could find was only 52 bpm. Anything 20 bpm or under someone can think of?

[PaulR]

Maybe not the slowest ever, but I once played a piece by Pierre Jalbert that had a tempo markings somewhere in the 40s.

[listener]

John Cage: As Slow As Possible
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/2728595.stm
The first notes in the longest and slowest piece of music in history, designed to go on for 639 years, are being played on a German church organ on Wednesday.

The three notes, which will last for a year-and-a-half, are just the start of the piece, called As Slow As Possible.

Composed by late avant-garde composer John Cage, who died in 1992, the performance has already been going for 17 months - although all that has been heard so far is the sound of the organ's bellows being inflated.

We started discussing - what is as slow as possible for the organ?

The music will be played in Halberstadt, a small town renowned for its ancient organs in central Germany.

It was originally a 20-minute piece for piano, but a group of musicians and philosophers decided to take the title literally and work out how long the longest possible piece of music could last.

They settled on 639 years because the Halberstadt organ was 639 years old in the year 2000.

[Dax]

Cornelius Cardew - The Great Learning Paragraph 4. Indication for the chorus is
quaver = MM 6-12.

[Luke]

ooooh, that's a good un!

Of course in the somewhat more mainstream repertoire there are pages of Messiaen which are pretty darn slow - the cello solo in the Quartet for the End of Time, for instance, at semiquaver = 44 (therefore, crotchet = 11)

[Luke]

The Cage piece, by the way, isn't as long as the 1000 years of Longplayer.... but long isn't the same thing as slow tempo, of course, and I'm not really sure we can talk about tempo in these cases anyway!

[Joe Barron]

Charles Ives liked slow, particularly in his finales. Several of his best known last movements are marked Largo, and the slower they're played, the better.

[Saul]

Very slow... hold on tight...

http://www.youtube.com/v/bZ1e2YgCWs0&feature=related

[jowcol]

I believe that the group Black Sabbath did something at 16 BPM....

[jochanaan]

So much depends on the audible beat, or lack thereof.  If, for example, a piece is marked at 24 bpm to the quarter note but the musicians are beating sixteenth notes (that's "crotchets" and "semiquavers" to you folks on the other side of the Pond), you have an audible beat of 96 rather than 24, hardly a candidate for "slowest possible."

Among the slowest in the standard repertoire, both in note values and perceived rhythm, is the Largo from Beethoven's Piano Concerto #3.  It's notated in 3/8 time but counted in a divided 3, so the sixteenth note gets the beat; and usually pianists and conductors play the movement at an average of about 60 bpm or less to the 16th note, with considerable flexibility in the solo piano part!  The main difficulty in reading it is a visual confusion between 32nd notes, 64th notes and 128th notes--demisemiquavers, hemidemisemiquavers, and semihemidemisemiquavers! Similar difficulties characterize the final movement of LvB's last piano sonata, Opus 111, with its notoriously complex time signatures and a beginning and ending tempo that feels as if time itself has been suspended.

In both Mahler's Eighth and Ninth Symphonies we find the tempo marking "Adagissimo." (Did he use it in the Tenth as well?  I haven't found the Tenth's score in my usual sources...)

[Cato]

Music with the slowest tempo would be anything conducted by Sergiu Celibadache.   0:)

[some guy]

The Cage piece, by the way, isn't as long as the 1000 years of Longplayer.... but long isn't the same thing as slow tempo, of course, and I'm not really sure we can talk about tempo in these cases anyway!

Well, since the Halberstadt performance is of a piece that can fit on a single CD, if you play it fast enough, I guess tempo is an appropriate word. Cage never specified how slow slow was, hence the very liberal interpretation by the Halberstadt Leute.

The piece, just by the way, is called Organ2, ASLSP. Here's a clip of the chord I heard when I was there in 2009. It's due to change any time now, as I recall.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tlk0dLxx2vY

[greg]

Cornelius Cardew - The Great Learning Paragraph 4. Indication for the chorus is
quaver = MM 6-12.

And this is the slowest tempo marking I now know of. 

Very slow... hold on tight...

There's someone on youtube who plays this much faster- it was the "official" fastest guitarist in the world (Guinness, maybe?)

I guess the "fastest" guitarist in this way is only the one who can play Flight of the Bumblebee the fastest...    The guitarist who is probably acknowledged as the fastest typically is Shawn Lane (though he's dead now)- after watching him and the other "fastest guitarists" I can pretty much agree with this. 


The Cage piece sounds dumb. A lot of his stuff is interesting as an idea, but that's it.
I've listened to a bit of the Long Player before... it's okay for a minute.

I believe that the group Black Sabbath did something at 16 BPM....

I looked it up and couldn't find anything.
But, I could believe something like this because some of their music is the prototype of doom metal. 

Speaking of doom metal, Sun 0))) has pretty slowwwwwwwww music (technically, they're drone metal, which is supposed to be related), though there is no tempo marking- sometimes like one note a minute. Kinda like Penderecki in the sense that it's temporal instead of rhythmic.

[some guy]

The Cage piece sounds dumb. A lot of his stuff is interesting as an idea, but that's it.

An acquaintance of mine saw my clip on youtube, and, on the strength of it bought one of the CDs of this.

His response? That it changed the way he listened. Much more positive than "sounds dumb," but no less revealing....

[snyprrr]

Very slow... hold on tight...

http://www.youtube.com/v/bZ1e2YgCWs0&feature=related

You'll have to look up the "Fastest Guitar Player', or something (he's Brazilian),... but he plays it at 180bpm. That's what they said,...180! It literally sounds like hummingbird wings, haha.

At first I thought you were being cheeky, but, yes, this IS slow, haha!

[greg]

It's 4:44 of this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THXCi3H3NzM

I remember JDP commenting that the guy's music is boring. I never even listened- not even interested.

The speed is "Flight of the Bumblebee" at 320 bpm. He plays it perfectly, though it has to be palm muted mostly so it can sound clean enough.

[snyprrr]

It's 4:44 of this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THXCi3H3NzM

I remember JDP commenting that the guy's music is boring. I never even listened- not even interested.

The speed is "Flight of the Bumblebee" at 320 bpm. He plays it perfectly, though it has to be palm muted mostly so it can sound clean enough.

Yea, it doesn't sound so fast anymore,...huh.

Oh, that guy looks sooooo bored being the FastestGuitarPlayer. Yawn!

[snyprrr]

btw- Late Xenakis can plod along at 30bpm.

[greg]

btw- Late Xenakis can plod along at 30bpm.

I know what you mean!