I call myself a culture blogger, but I completely missed this, which the BBC reported on over ten days ago:

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, 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.
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.

Peter Simple wouldn't need to change a word of that.

The phrase in the above report that gives the game away is the bit that says "and philosophers". It says something good about the music profession that on their own, and unlike their visual arts cousins, they might not have been capable of this degree of insanity. It took the addition of some philosophers to their number to push them completely over the boundary where it says "one step further and you are officially completely barking bonkers".

But that last bit can't be right. Surely if a piece of music can last for 639 years, there is no particular problem about it going on for a couple of centuries longer. What has the mere age of the Halberstadt organ in the year 2000 to do with the maximum length of a piece of music? Either the BBC has got this wrong, which is possible, or these musicians and philosophers are not only completely mad, but also, and unlike many other completely mad people, rather illogical.

But this report is rather late. Maybe this stunt has already fizzled out. Or maybe April 1st in Germany happens early in February.

My thanks to heavyweight culture watcher Dave Barry for drawing my attention to this extraordinarily silly event.