Longest music recital

"Longplayer" is a piece of music composed by banjo player, Jem Finer (a member of the successful folk band The Pogues). Finer uses a bank of computers located at Trinity Buoy Wharf Lighthouse in London, UK, to sequence simultaneous combinations of six short pieces of music composed by Finer and played on Tibetan Singing Bowls. The piece was started as the clocks moved in to the new millennium on 1 January 2000, and will not repeat the same exact combination of music until the last second of 31 December 2999, when the piece can start its second rendition. As of 13 October 2017, the piece had been playing for 17 years 285 days of its 1,000-year projected run.

At one millennium in length, this piece of music is the longest discrete musical composition.

The composer intended the piece as a meditation on the nature of time, philosophy, physics and cosmology: "It occurred to me that to make a piece of music exactly 1000 years long not only solved the problem of how to 'make' time, but added another dimension to the idea by opening up questions about music and sound, composition and duration. The simple idea that popped into my mind, 'write a 1000 year long piece of music,' demanded solutions to an ever expanding range of questions; how to deal with changing cultural perceptions of music, how to listen to music too long to hear completely, where to place it, what technology to base it on, how to make it available to the public… and perhaps most importantly, how to plan for its survival."