#longplayer

Visitors experiencing ambient music inside the relaxation chamber of the Millenium Dome, London, 2000.

quarter of a century ago, a former Celtic punk musician began a performance of a song so absurdly long that it has still not finished playing. Measured against historical averages, it should still be playing centuries after most countries as we know them today have ceased to exist. Jem Finer, best known as a founding member of The Pogues, had long been preoccupied with time: its instability, its scale, and the problem of how to put into perspective the sheet length of a millennium. While still touring in the 1990s, he began experimenting with real-time composition, gradually arriving at a question that was philosophical before it was musical: how to create a work that exceeds a human lifespan. The result was Longplayer (@longplayer), conceived between 1995 and 1999 with support from Brian Eno and David Toop. At its core is a 20-minute source composition for Tibetan singing bowls, transposed into six interrelated layers that move through time at different rates. Their superimposition never repeats, governed by a deterministic algorithm that will only complete its cycle at the final moment of 2999, before beginning again. The piece began playing at midnight on January 1st, 2000, and continues without interruption. Designed to withstand technological, political, and environmental change, Longplayer has migrated across formats to include computers, analog systems, live performance, encoded light transmission, and human voices. More than a piece of music, Finer has described it as a living, social organism, dependent on care across generations. If all machines fail, the score can still be sung. “If there is nothing else left,” he says, “there is our breath.”

Photos from a live performance of Jem Finer's Longplayer, 2009.

Longplayer

The tower of the lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf no longer houses powerful lighting equipment, but instead is filled with the ethereal chimes and resonances of Longplayer, a composition destined to be one thousand years long. Beginning on 31st December 1999, it will not be completed until 31st December 2999 – at which point it will start all over again.

Longplayer’s staggering length results from the treatment of its source composition: a 20 min 20 sec score for Tibetan Singing Bowls, which has then been transposed six times such that each transposition varies in pitch and duration. Six sections from these pieces play simultaneously, chosen so that no combination is repeated until exactly one thousand years has passed. All this is currently done by computer – Longplayer lives as a live-stream and can be heard outside of its Trinity Buoy Wharf home at several “listening post”, as well as online (the singing bowls on display at the lighthouse were used for a special live performance).

The creator of Longplayer, Jem Finer, describes it as not just a piece of exceptionally long music, but also an experiment in how time is experienced and understood from the perspectives of philosophy, physics and cosmology. In particular, there is the question of how one keeps a piece of music playing across generations. The technology currently running the composition will inevitably become obsolete – how will it adapt? How will the responsibility of looking after the music be passed on across the 950 or so years after its original custodians have perished?