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“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
Whilst I write this, I am listening to an app on my phone that has been playing music continuously for the last 25 years - and will continue playing for the next 975. It is a score structured around a cycle of six circles, each representing a modified version of a source composition based on various singing bowls. Every combination of sound is unique. Its melody blooms through the thread of time like a fractal.
Longplayer is composed by Jem Finer, who described the impulse behind the work:
“In the mid 1990s, as the year 2000 approached, I started to wonder about how to make sense of a millennium - that is, how to render as sensible or tangible the great span of one thousand years… and how to possibly focus the mind on time as a longer and slower process than the frenetic jump-cut pace of the late 20th Century.”
I play the music to Char. We listen to it for a moment and begin to realise that this isn’t just a piece of music. It conjures up in my mind the visual of a ribbon of sound rooted in the past, playing in the present, and flowing into the future.
Then Char says something that makes my heart beat faster, amplifies the sound, and resonates with me deeply:
“Do you realise that this was playing when your Dad was alive?”
It adds a whole new level of meaning - one of connection. I start to think of my ancestors - and the generations of people who will live after I am gone. The ones who might witness the mind-throbbingly meaningful end of the thread of music. To stand and look down upon a thousand-year thread - vertiginous, magical, awe-inspiring.
Jem’s Longplayer is an enchantment in an age of disenchantment - yet through his lens, even that age feels small, fleeting, almost weightless against the sweep of a thousand years.
But I know I’ve already had this kind of feeling before, on my travels. I think of a chapel I recently visited that is just over 1,000 years old: St. Mary Magdalen’s in Ripon.
I remember the day I first saw it.
I’m struck by the comeliness of it - a chick, perhaps, from the mother hen cathedral at Ripon. But this little chapel is as rare as hen’s teeth, and far more precious. Founded by Archbishop Thurstan (1114–1140) as the chapel to the Hospital of St. Mary Magdalen, built to shelter lepers, it stands today as a rare and remarkable fragment of a medieval hospital.
Upon closer inspection, it is less chick and more mother hen - sat within great brooding buttresses to the west and north sides. The south door with its arched chevrons is a remnant of Thurstan’s chapel, but the rest is largely fifteenth-century.
To the north is an unusually low window, thought to allow access for the lepers. A nest of quatrefoils crowns the perpendicular east window. They are so eager, so expressive, they might be swifts, mouths open, on the verge, waiting to be fed.
I walk inside and stop to take it all in.
The chancel screen partitions the view to the east and sieves the light out west. The weather is perfect - the shadows are working towards beauty’s end. The roof timbers stretch like strip lights, and the brick floor is desaturated and textured with refraction - apart from a patterned mosaic in front of the altar, which pricks out the shadows of every single piece. The central roundel is Roman.
Michael Morris, Co-Director of Artangel - the organisation that commissioned Longplayer - says:
“In making time tangible, the continuum of Longplayer helps to reduce the vertiginous fear of infinity… the music can be seen as a beacon or rallying call for long-term survival strategies, at a time of quick fix and in a culture of short change.”
This building is the Longplayer set in stone and oak. Rather than the pulsating rhythm of six bowls, it might sound more like a symphony.
In Longplayer terms, unlike the cathedral nearby - with its music spread far and wide (the Glastonbury of the ecclesiastical world) - here it is powerful and super-concentrated. Every nook and crevice, mortar joint, quatrefoil and mould stop is singing - and unlike Longplayer, it’s been singing unbroken for over a millennium.
Each circle of the Longplayer represents a version of the source music - set at different pitches, moving at different speeds. One of them will take the full thousand years to complete its cycle. I find myself imagining the chapel in circles too: time, the turning seasons, historic events, the rhythm of its use (which once included pigs), the shifts in its fabric and form.
Here’s my chance to have parity with the generations that might listen to the final note of Longplayer in 975 years’ time. Here’s my chance to look down upon a thousand-year thread of time and try to comprehend what this building means to me.
I think we try to make sense of time because it resists possession - always slipping through our fingers. So we try to catch it in rituals and routines, in anniversaries and absences. We fold it into calendars, measure it in hours, try to stretch it when we’re behind, and shrink it when it asks too much of us.
But beneath all that, I think it’s something more.
Time, here in the chapel, isn’t just measured - it is accumulated. It gathers in the stone, lingers in the joints between one generation and the next. It doesn’t move in a straight line, but eddies, returns, deepens.
There is something in that which speaks to all of us - of faith and beyond it. Perhaps even a kind of religion for the agnostic and the atheist: not built on belief, but on continuity which is the very essence of Jem’s Longplayer.
We measure time to find rhythm. Breath, sleep, seasons, sunrise, decay - they all carry a pulse. Without it, we’re unmoored. So we listen for it. We build clocks, chapels, songs, make art and longplayers that echo a beat much bigger than us.
It’s about wanting to belong to something. To feel the thread that connects us to the people who came before, and the ones who'll come after. To know that our small moment isn’t meaningless, even if it’s fleeting.
Time helps us remember. And remembering helps us stay human. It holds the grief, the joy, the change. It gives us a way to carry what matters and gently let go of what doesn’t.
Time gives us perspective. It lifts us above the scramble and shows us the slow, glacial sweep of things.
And so we return to St. Mary Magdalen’s - not simply a building of stone and oak, but a living thread woven through a thousand years of time. Perhaps what it offers us now is a gentle challenge: to reframe how we see places like this. Not as relics, but as custodians of the long view. Not as monuments to the past, but as instruments still playing - holding memory, meaning, and continuity.
In an age of quick fixes and short cycles, this little chapel asks us to listen more closely, to care more deeply, and to see our heritage not as nostalgia, but as a form of wisdom. A shelter for what matters. A slow, steady song- one that has been playing for a thousand years, connecting past, present and future in a single sustained unbroken chord.
Visit St. Mary Magdalen's, Ripon.
The Longplayer
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Photographs and words by Andy Marshall (unless otherwise stated). Most photographs are taken with Iphone 14 Pro and DJI Mini 3 Pro.
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