Longplayer

A note from the composer

‘Longplayer is a piece of music I wrote at the end of the last century. It's long(ish), being a looping composition that repeats once every 1000 years. But really the music isn't the whole point.

It grew out of a lifelong curiosity about time and its dimensions, traced back to temporally vertiginous childhood encounters with starlight and ancient stones and the ebb and flow of time before clocks. For me it's more about creating a space to dream one's way into long flows of time, an experiment in ‘making’ time. But everyone has their own take on it - which is as it should be.’ - Jem Finer

Longplayer is composed in such a way that its music changes from day to day and ‒ though it is beyond the reach of any one person’s experience ‒ from century to century. It works in a way somewhat akin to a system of planets, which are aligned only once every thousand years, and whose orbits meanwhile move in and out of phase with each other. In a similar way, Longplayer is predetermined from beginning to end ‒ its movements are calculable, but are occurring on a scale so vast as to be all but unknowable. 

Longplayer’s composition uses a minimum amount of information and material to create the maximum amount of variety, in terms of both sound and form. While it is a system-based composition, it is made out of very expansive and resonant musical material, which in itself is not systematic’ sounding. This material (the ‘source music’) is played on singing bowls, which possess a simple but harmonically rich sound, and a quality which is at once both physical and ethereal.

Implicit in Longplayerʼs composition is the ability for it to be performed by any technology, a necessity given its duration and the futureʼs unpredictability. Until now it’s been performed mostly by computers, while more recently an iOS app was released on the iTunes store introducing a new way to listen to Longplayer, anywhere, at any time and without the need for a data connection. This 'Amsterdam' version is played through an iPad and a 360° speaker.

However, Longplayer was created with a full awareness of the inevitable obsolescence of this technology, and is not in itself bound to the computer or any other technological form. Although computer devices are a cheap and accurate way in which Longplayer can play, it is important ‒ in order to legislate for its survival ‒ that a medium outside the digital realm be found. To this end, one objective has been to research alternative methods of performance, including mechanical, non-electrical and human-operated versions. Among these is a graphical score for six players and 234 singing bowls. The first performance based on this score took place over 1,000 minutes on 12 ‒ 13 September, 2009, at the Roundhouse, London.

During the Holland Festival, Longplayer can be experienced by one person at a time in the tower of the Lloyd Hotel, a place that is normally inaccessible to visitors.