| Other long pieces of music | Don McClean – American Pie (8 ½ minutes), Beatles – Revolution No.9 (a very hard listen at around 10 minutes), Mahler – 3rd Symphony – 100 minutes, Tristan and Isolde – Wagner – 3 hours 50 minutes, Wagner's Ring Cycle – 4 parts (18 hours in total). |
Longplayer is a 1000 year long piece of music. It started playing on 31st December 1999 and won't repeat itself until 31st December 2999. It has been playing in Rufford Country Park since 2002. Neil Bennison, the arts marketing manager for Notts County Council, tells us why Longplayer is so long, why it is being played in our county and why we should have a listen. In Neil's words... Longplayer is a piece of music / art installation that was created using a computer programme. It recreates the sounds produced by Tibetan singing bowls (a musical instrument played by striking with a soft mallet) and gongs. It runs, uninterrupted, for a 1000 years before it repeats a sequence. It was created by musician Jem Finer, who's described in his biography as coming from a background in computer science and punk. He has worked with a host of different musicians, including Joe Strummer, Kirsty McColl, Steve Earle and The Chieftains. One of his biggest claims to fame is that he co-founded The Pogues and one of his best-known songs – particularly at this time of year – is Fairytale of New York. It should be said that Longplayer is a world away from these pieces! Computer generated
 | | Neil Bennison |
The music is generated by the computer playing six loops taken from a pre-recorded 20 minute, 20 second composition. Each of the loops is a different pitch and runs at a different speed. The computer programme therefore produces ever-changing layers of sound. It's very calming and hypnotic. It's a reflection on time, specifically the length of a millennium, which we can often be a bit blasé about. Whilst we'd all agree that 1000 years is a very long time, we probably don't think how long this really is. Longplayer reminds us in a very simple but powerful way. Reasons behind it It's been running for over four years at Rufford but it's actually got hundreds of years to go before it repeats itself. None of us can ever experience the whole piece of music.
 | | Rufford Abbey |
We live in an age of extreme pace and much of technology these days is about making everything go faster. Longplayer, ironically, uses technology to remind us of how slow time actually is, when we really contemplate it. The first Longplayer installations were set up as public listening posts to run simultaneously in a Lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf in East London and at the Millennium Dome (in the Rest Zone). Around three million people experienced it at the Dome. On the other side of the world, one was sited in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Appropriately, the London installations were funded by money from the National Lottery's Millennium Fund. You can hear it at Trinity Buoy Wharf in the East India Dock, London; in Egypt, at the Library in Alexandria; in Brisbane at the Powerhouse; or at Rufford Country Park, in the Apsidal Gallery. Longplayer online There's also a Longplayer website where you can download some of the musical sequence as MP3 files – just the thing for a long soak in the bath with a few jos-sticks! | 
