A Long Song

Longplayer – The Longest Musical Composition

Today saw a group of musicians take over the performance of Longplayer, a thousand year long musical composition that began on the 31st of December 1999 and will continue without repetition until the end of 2999, when its cycle will be complete and the piece will begin again.

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 (think Fairytale of New York, the best Christmas song ever) 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.

At present Longplayer is being streamed live over the internet and is being performed by computer, but just for today 26 musicians will take over the performance for 1000 minutes at The Roundhouse, Chalk Farm Road in London.

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.