“Longest Concert Ever” Is Actually 1000 Years

The ringing sounds coming out of the lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Warf, London are blips from a 1,000-year-long opus. This millennial organism, entitled Longplayer, was born at midnight on the 31st of December 1999 and will (hopefully) continue living until that same moment in 2999. The Longplayer can be heard from various listening posts around the world and via a live audio stream (which I suggest you plug into now while reading the rest of the article).

The Longplayer’s computer uses recordings of Tibetan singing bowls to compose its music. Due to the nature of the project, the Longplayer’s song is capable of being played digitally, mechanically, or by humans if need be for survival. “[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.”

In contrast to the 639-year ORGAN2/ASLSP project, the Longplayer does not play excruciatingly long tones; rather, it plays regular length notes from a computer generated 1,000-year score. Six short pieces of music (the source music) are split into sections which are combined and played simultaneously to create the composition. “Longplayer chooses and combines these sections in such a way that no combination is repeated until exactly one thousand years has passed. At this point the composition arrives back at the point at which it first started. In effect Longplayer is an infinite piece of music repeating every thousand years – a millennial loop.”

Unlike the ORGAN2/ASLP’s purpose of contrasting the “jump-cut pace” of modern society, the Longplayer’s purpose is to test humanity, technology, and survivability over a period of 1,000 years. The Longplayer idea asks these questions: “How does one keep a piece of music playing across generations? How does one prepare for its technological adaptability, knowing how few technologies have remained viable over the last millenium? How does one legislate for its upkeep? And how can one communicate that responsibility to those who might be looking after it some 950 years after its original custodians have perished?”

The idea of the Longplayer originated from the mind of Jem Finer who wanted to make sense of a millennium.

Read more about Longplayer and the people involved at the Longplayer website!