Longplayer Live at Roundhouse, 5th April 2025
On the 31st December 2024, Longplayer completed the first quarter century of its score. Throughout 2025, this milestone will be marked with an international programme of events, collaborations and initiatives celebrating the work’s unique articulation of time and its dimensions, and the engagement with the long-term that Longplayer continues to inspire.
Longplayer Live
The first of our 25th anniversary events was Longplayer Live, the first live performance of the work in over a decade, which took place at the Roundhouse on the 5th April 2025.
Image credit: Kristian Buss.
7.20am-midnight, 5th April 2025
On 5th April 2025, Longplayer returned to the Roundhouse for a performance of the 1000-minute section of its score, as written for that particular time and date, from 7.20am to midnight.
Longplayer’s duration means that, given the unknowability of the future, its score was written so as to be independent of any one technology. For most of its life it has been performed by computers, while its caretakers, the Longplayer Trust, explore alternatives which have included the use of the human voice, vinyl records, code, a beam of light and, as first heard at the Roundhouse in 2009, live performance by musicians.
Akin to what Longplayer’s composer, Jem Finer, calls a ‘vast, Bronze Age synthesiser’, Longplayer Live is performed on a large orchestral instrument comprised of 234 singing bowls, arranged in six concentric rings and played by shifts of six to twelve people at any one time, reading from a graphic score.
Audiences were invited to spend as long as they wish listening and watching, and to move around or find a space to rest, with the possibility to leave and return to the venue throughout the performance’s duration.
Longplayer hopes to enrich intergenerational conversations about how we can imagine the future. For this 25th anniversary performance, 16 young people from the Roundhouse’s creative community joined the orchestra of musicians and artists: a meeting of present and future custodians who will shape Longplayer’s next 25 years.
Longplayer Live was generously supported by the Trinity Buoy Wharf Trust and Urban Space Management. Thanks is also due to Universal Works for their generosity in supporting, designing and making the performers’ clothing.
Sponsor a Longplayer Live bowl
Did you know that you can sponsor one of the singing bowls that makes up the Longplayer Live instrument? In order to fund the continuing work on the instrument and the production of events, The Longplayer Trust is inviting donations on a bowl-by-bowl basis.
When you sponsor a bowl, it is engraved with a word of your choice. You can record a special occasion, commemorate a person or event, or inscribe a significant word with personal resonances, which will be heard vibrating in Longplayer Live performances.
Only seven bowls of the 234-wide instrument now remain to be sponsored.
If you enjoy Longplayer, and would like to support the Longplayer Trust in our efforts to make it available to as wide an audience as possible, then please consider sponsoring a bowl or making a donation. You can find out more on how to do this here: https://longplayer.org/support/sponsor-a-bowl/
