Longplayer: A thousand year long musical composition

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Longplayer is a one-thousand-year-long musical composition. It began playing at midnight on the 31st of December 1999, and will continue to play without repetition until the last moment of 2999, at which point it will complete its cycle and begin again. Conceived and composed by Jem Finer, it was originally produced as an Artangel commission, and is now in the care of the Longplayer Trust.

Longplayer was composed by musician and computer scientist Jem Finer to be played on singing bowls, a traditional standing bell from Tibet, and can be performed by humans or machines.

Jem Finer is best known as a founding member of The Pogues but has also won awards for his innovative cutting edge musical compositions.

Among his recent works are Score for Hole in the Ground, where hidden percussive instruments are played by an underground waterfall; Landscope, which detected storms on Jupiter, and The Centre of the Universe, a spiral tower that generated music from the cosmos.

Longplayer can be heard in the lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf, London, where it has been playing since it began. It can also be heard at several other listening posts around the world, and globally via a live stream on the Internet.

Longplayer is composed for singing bowls – an ancient type of standing bell – which can be played by both humans and machines, and whose resonances can be very accurately reproduced in recorded form. It is designed to be adaptable to unforeseeable changes in its technological and social environments, and to endure in the long-term as a self-sustaining institution.

Because the piece is ultimately intended to play across several centuries a special trust has been formed to ensure that it continue without interruption, and will appoint a never ending series of caretakers to preserve the music in whatever form the future makes necessary.

In this way, the composer hopes that Longplayer will evolve as a social organism and flow organically through various mediums during the next thousand years.

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