This past weekend saw the first live performance of an extract from “Longplayer,” a composition – or, perhaps more accurately, musical system – by Jem Finer (ex of The Pogues). The composition started playing at midnight on December 31, 1999, and will play continuously until the same day and time, 2999, at which point either the apes who rule the planet will either turn off the computer that has been performing the thing thusfar, or it will start all over again. (Prompting some listeners to renew their shouted requests for “Sweet Home Alabama.”)

The first live performance of the score – which is performed entirely on Tibetan singing bowls, for a lot of highly philosophical and abstract reasons but mostly because they are intensely beautiful and haunting to listen to – was done in London, England over 1,000 minutes, from Saturday morning to Sunday evening. There is even video of Finer performing some of it himself.

The whole thing, with its mix of music, technology, and infrastructure is vaguely similar to the Montreal’s Silophone project. Here’s what it says on the Longplayer website:

Longplayer grew out of a conceptual concern with problems of representing and understanding the fluidity and expansiveness of time. While it found form as a musical composition, it can also be understood as a living, 1000 year long process – an artificial life form programmed to seek its own survival strategies. More than a piece of music, Longplayer is a social organism, depending on people – and the communication between people – for its continuation, and existing as a community of listeners across centuries.

Those are some fairly grand claims being made about a piece of conceptual art. And it’s hard not to feel a little puzzled at the imperative implied in that bit about it “depending on people.” by its very nature, this piece of music has no real need for listeners. It’s just going to go on and on, even if no one is listening. That may be an interesting idea to muse on and discuss over drinks, but it’s not quite of the same class as other things that require people for survival (e.g., languages, ideas, communities, etc.), because, despite its extraordinary length, the piece is all pre-set, its existence is static. We know exactly what sounds will come out of it on this day five hundred years from now. In other words, it will not respond to human needs or the forces of history. Its existence is binary: it is either playing, or it isn’t. Other than that, it don’t need us. It’s like Miles Davis turning his back on the audience – times, well, a thousand.

I wouldn’t be shocked if the plug gets pulled within two or three decades, because of changing technology, lack of funds, or invasion by a race of aliens who always hated the Pogues, but really, it wouldn’t matter if the thing went silent tomorrow – the concept is the most interesting part, anyway. To actually go the whole millenium seems almost beside the point.

(Image from Longplayer Live by Cormac Heron.)