Longplayer in the Lady Chapel, Exeter Cathedral,
4th-31st August
Last week, members of the Longplayer Trust visited Exeter Cathedral, which, founded around 1050 AD, celebrates its 975th anniversary this year. The Cathedral Library is also home to the 10th century collection of Old English poetry, known as the Exeter Book, recognised by UNESCO as the foundation volume of English literature. After visiting, our chair, Sam Kinchin-Smith, shared a 1960s translation of some Gnomic verses contained in the book. Three lines have been looping around like an ancient earworm in our minds since:
‘The sound unstill
the deep dead wave
is darkest longest.’
The sense of an unstill sound, its enduring movement and momentum, seems to resonate with Longplayer’s project of continuity. It speaks, perhaps, to the low resonance of a long wave, to its slow journey into the future. But ‘sound’ here might not be strictly audible. A sound is also a passage between the sea and the shore, that which connects two distinct spaces, or an inlet that opens one body of water unto the other. Longplayer’s 1000-year-long composition does not simply endure: it opens up space in which to imagine distant futures, connecting us, in turn, to deep pasts.
While Longplayer is set to complete its concentric cycles of sound 975 years from now, 975 years have passed since the foundation of Exeter Cathedral.
Throughout August, a Longplayer listening post will be installed in the Lady Chapel of Exeter Cathedral, to celebrate this symmetry and to mark the cathedral’s 975th anniversary and Longplayer’s 25th.
This installation invites visitors to stand at the pivot point of a timespan of almost two millennia – nearly that of the whole history of Christianity. This is an opportunity to imaginatively inhabit the distant past through the fabric of the cathedral building, and the distant future through the Longplayer score.
We hope that their concurrent presence will offer a uniquely expressive and expansive space for reflection: for imagining better futures, enabled by art and technology, and underpinned by centuries of unbroken ritual and tradition.
Longplayer will be audible in the Lady Chapel during the cathedral’s regular opening hours, Monday to Saturday 9.15am-5pm, and Sunday 11.30am-3pm, except when there are services. Admission costs between £8-10, and children under 18 enter for free.
To read more about the installation and to plan your visit see here.
Look out for further announcements of special events inspired by and interacting with the installation later this year.
‘About Time’: Redcar Summer Exhibition
Redcar Contemporary Art Gallery, Whitby
12th July-24th August
This summer, Longplayer’s 1000-year-long score can also be heard unfolding in the main space of Redcar Contemporary Art Gallery in Whitby. Longplayer features as part of an exhibition “About Time”, curated by the brilliant Professor Susan Collins, an award-winning artist and former Director of the Slade School of Fine Art.
The exhibition invites reflection on memory, change, urgency, and cycles, offering artists a framework to explore everything from geological deep time to fleeting moments, future possibilities, and the rhythms of daily life and the environment.
It includes over 60 works from selected and invited artists working in all disciplines to interpret temporal themes demonstrating time’s layered presence in art and life. The show emphasises inclusivity and creativity across mediums such as painting, video, installation, performance and new media.
Entry to the exhibition is free, and the gallery is open Wednesday to Saturday 11am-4pm. See here for more details.
Trinity Buoy Wharf lighthouse
If you can’t get to one of our new installations, why not visit, or re-visit, our London listening post at the Trinity Buoy Wharf lighthouse? The lighthouse is open every Saturday and Sunday 11am-5pm throughout summer. There are many works of public art in the area, including the Time and Tide bell, which is rung by the movement of the sea at high tide daily, as well as exhibitions on the S. S. Robin. Check out Trinity Buoy Wharf’s website for updates, or our webpage to plan your visit.
There are many days left to sponsor in Longplayer’s calendar. If you’d like to support Longplayer’s continuation, then consider buying time. You can commemorate a special occasion as well as support the charitable work of The Longplayer Trust. By way of thanks, you will receive a unique signed score of your day, and will be invited to display a personal object in the Buying Time Cabinet at our Trinity Buoy Wharf lighthouse listening post. See here for more.
