First there was the story about Bob Dylan lifting lines for his lyrics from a memoir about Japanese gangsters. Then there was the one about the history of combat art and soldiers who went to war in Iraq armed with easels. In between there was the front-pager about a stretched-out John Cage composition that will take, if all goes well, 639 years to perform. It gets my vote for most intriguing arts story of 2003 so far.

Since the Journal is not online for anyone unwilling to pay a steep subscription fee — which is most of us — and since I haven't seen the Cage tale referred to online anywhere else in English except for this Minneapolis Star-Tribune editorial(free registration required) and this two-year-old BBC account, let me retell the basics:

The performance actually began a few days before 9/11 in "the forlorn eastern German city of Halberstadt ... in a crumbling medieval church," the Journal reported. "Each movement lasts 71 years. The shortest notes last six or seven months, the longest about 35 years. There's an intermission in 2319."

If you missed the opening of the concert, you didn't miss much because the music "begins with a rest, or silence" that lasted for the first 17 months until Feb. 5 of this year, when the first three notes sounded. "Within the church's crude stonewalls," the Journal reported, "a steady, unvarying chord can be heard 24 hours a day. Two more notes will be added in July 2004."

Cage wrote the work for a German organist, Gerd Zacher, who premiered it at a music festival in France. His performance lasted only 29 minutes. So it's no surprise that Zacher disagrees with the tempo being used in Halberstadt. According to the Journal, although the ASLP tempo marking means "as slow as possible," Gerd says Cage told him the work should be played like "a soft morning" and then "should be gone."

It's not unusual for musicians to disagree about tempo markings. To this day, the greatest maestros haven't definitively settled what tempi Mozart or Beethoven wanted for some of their works. But the friendly disagreeement over "Organ2/ASLP" has to be the most staggering conceivable.

The reasons for stretching out the performance have less to do with music than with reconstructing an ancient organ to play it on and creating a tourist attraction in Halberstadt to help revive its economy. Whatever the reasons, who but a bunch of Cageans would have thought of a concert lasting six centuries?

I myself relish the idea. But it's funny how serious composers turned music into a philosophical game in a way that visual artists have only recently come to emulate (thanks to the minimalists and other postmodernists) and writers and dramatists never really did (Dadaists and Surrealists notwithstanding). Funny, and for most listeners, unfortunate.