Longest piece of music goes live

[jimmy olsen]

WTF? Does it just loop over and over, it can't possibly be unique the whole way through.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/arts_and_culture/8252444.stm

Longest piece of music goes live

The world's longest piece of music is being performed live for the first time on a unique 20-metre-wide instrument at a concert at The Roundhouse in London.

The Longplayer is a 1,000-year-long composition by Jem Finer and is played out by computer at several public listening posts around the world.

It began playing on 31 December 1999 and will continue - without repetition - until the last moment of 2999.

The live performance will play a 1,000 minute section of the music.

The performance began on Saturday morning and continue until the early hours of Sunday morning.

It was in 2002 that Finer - who was also one of the founding members of pop group The Pogues - developed a score for the music.

It allows the piece to be played as an orchestral installation comprising of six concentric rings of Tibetan singing bowls.

It is this arrangement that is being performed at the Roundhouse concert.

The Longplayer is continually played out at its flagship location, the Lighthouse in Trinity Buoy Wharf in London, but listening posts are also stationed in Australia, Egypt and the US.

[Neil]

It'll stop when the power goes out.

[The Brain]

It'll stop when the power goes out.

It is powered by Timmayesque retarded exuberance.

[Neil]

It'll stop when the power goes out.

It is powered by Timmayesque retarded exuberance.

Then it'll stop when humanity becomes extinct, which will be well before 2999.

[Josquius]

OK....WTF.
Sounds dumb, they couldn't possibly have written such a thing.

[Sheilbh]

WTF? Does it just loop over and over, it can't possibly be unique the whole way through.

No piece of music is unique the whole way through

[DisturbedPervert]

It began playing on 31 December 1999 and will continue - without repetition - until the last moment of 2999.

Somehow I don't find this very likely

[jimmy olsen]

WTF? Does it just loop over and over, it can't possibly be unique the whole way through.

No piece of music is unique the whole way through

You know what I mean.

[Sheilbh]

You know what I mean.

Not really.  Lots of music introduces a theme or series of sounds and then recapitulates or rephrases that initial start.  Some twentieth century composers were really interested in repetition or ways of writing music that was effectively impersonal - which is what this sounds like given that it's done by computer.

[Sheilbh]

Actually the music is both unique and not:

The composition of Longplayer results from the application of simple and precise rules to six short pieces of music. Six sections from these pieces – one from each – are playing simultaneously at all times. 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.

[Eddie Teach]

when humanity becomes extinct, which will be well before 2999.

50 bucks says you're wrong.

[Neil]

when humanity becomes extinct, which will be well before 2999.

50 bucks says you're wrong.

Done.

Let me know where you bank so that I can take the money out of the abandoned vault in the bleak, empty future to come.

[Jaron]

I bank in BoVault 13.

[Syt]

1000 years? That beats this German 639-year composition.
First notes for 639-year composition

The first notes in the longest and slowest piece of music in history, designed to go on for 639 years, are being played on a German church organ on Wednesday.

The three notes, which will last for a year-and-a-half, are just the start of the piece, called As Slow As Possible.

Composed by late avant-garde composer John Cage, who died in 1992, the performance has already been going for 17 months - although all that has been heard so far is the sound of the organ's bellows being inflated.

The music will be played in Halberstadt, a small town renowned for its ancient organs in central Germany.

It was originally a 20-minute piece for piano, but a group of musicians and philosophers decided to take the title literally and work out how long the longest possible piece of music could last.

They settled on 639 years because the Halberstadt organ was 639 years old in the year 2000.

"We started discussing - what is as slow as possible for the organ?" Swedish composer and organist Hans-Ola Ericsson told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

"We, a group of theologians, musicologists, philosophers, composers and organists, met during a couple of years solely to discuss this question. It was rather wonderful to have one topic to discuss at length."

"We came up with the answer that the piece could last for the duration of the organ - that is the lifetime of an organ."

Mr Ericsson said John Cage would have liked what they had done with it.

"It's a sound that we give to the future to take care of, and hopefully the aesthetics and the ideas of John Cage will manage to survive."

The first note is due to be struck at 1800 local time (1700 GMT) on Wednesday.

The performance follows a legal case in which composer Mike Batt was forced to pay a six-figure sum to Cage's publishers, who accused him of plagiarising a silent piece of music.

[Eddie Teach]

He wouldn't be the inspiration for the martial artist of the same name by any chance?