8 The Music of Deep Time

Finer breaks down the system of the piece into five steps:

1. Take one piece of source music.
2. Repitch it into five transpositions.
3. Play the original and the five transpositions simultaneously.
4. Every two minutes, start again from a point slightly advanced from where you last started.
5. Assign a different amount of advancement to each transposition and use it consistently. Repeat for 1,000 years.^[17]

 

A tiny portion of “Longplayer” was performed live, using this graphic score, at the Roundhouse in London in 2009. As seen in the photograph taken during the performance, the bowls and performers are arranged to mirror the graphic score.

 

In addition to this 2009 performance, “Longplayer” is currently streaming at several listening stations that are open to the public. The flagship station is located at the top of the lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf in London. Another is installed at the Yorkshire Sculpture Garden, and a third sits within the Long Now Foundation Museum in San Francisco’s Fort Mason.

An album is available through the Bandcamp website featuring four selections of the ongoing piece recorded between 2000 and 2002 (https://longplayer.bandcamp.com/album/longplayer). The Longplayer website also states that an archive of all recorded sound files of sections of the piece will soon be available to stream and download, offering listeners a chance to comb through the decades and hear a particular combination occurring at a specific date and time.

The third piece is an ambient album by musician and composer Brian Eno, influenced by his close involvement with the Long Now Foundation. The album is a series of sound studies inspired by the construction of a clock designed by Danny Hillis that will keep time for ten thousand years. As Hillis described it, he wanted “to build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every one hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium.”^[18] A prototype of the clock was built in time to hear a chime as 1999 turned to 2000. A fully realized version of the clock is being constructed within a mountain in a remote location in Texas. Buried within a mountainside and deliberately built in an isolated location inaccessible by road, the clock is described as “an anti-monument” to emphasize how “the value of the clock is mostly in thinking about it.”^[19]

Stewart Brand is a founding member of the Long Now Foundation. In an essay he wrote about the clock on the foundation’s website, Brand remarks that

Such a clock, if sufficiently impressive and well-engineered, would embody deep time for people. It should be charismatic to visit, interesting to think about, and famous enough to become iconic in the public discourse. Ideally, it would do for thinking about time what the photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment. Such icons reframe the way people think.^[20]

 

 

Eno’s involvement in the Long Now Foundation, and the conceptual beginnings of the Clock of Long Now, began to intersect with his long-standing interest in ambient music—a genre whose name he not only coined but in which he has had a foundational role in forming and developing over the decades. Eno has used ideas drawn from cybernetics to avoid creating a musical composition in the traditional sense. Instead, Eno programs systems, or sets of rules, that generate interacting patterns of sound that he can either manipulate as they happen or allow to unfold organically. In a lecture he gave on this technique, which he calls generative music, Eno observed that most of his ambient pieces are “a system or a set of rules which once set in motion will create music for you.”^[21] Part of the motivation for this system is that it takes most of the elements of personal creative expression out of the composition. In many ways, the artist who sets up the musical system is as much an audience to the result as an audience would be hearing that system unfold in a performative setting.

From out of this creative process, Eno created bell-like tones on synthesizers to explore the sonic parallels of the Clock of the Long Now. As he reflects in the liner notes for the album, “when we started thinking about The Clock, we naturally wondered what kind of sound it could make to announce the passage of time. I had nurtured an interest in bells for many years, and this seemed like a good alibi for taking it a bit deeper.”^[22] His research led to the idea that using bells as a set of randomly interacting tones was an early form of generative music.4 Eno used synthesizers to model the tones of church bells, creating a system inspired by the generative music of bells to model the passage of long periods. He employed the idea of change-ringing, a generative system of various numbers of bells randomly interacting. As he states,

Change-ringing is the art (or, to many practitioners, the science) of ringing a given number of bells such that all possible sequences are used without any being repeated. The mathematics of this idea are fairly simple: n bells will yield n! sequences or changes. The ! is not an expression of surprise but the sign for a factorial: a direction to multiply the number by all those lower than it. So 3 bells will yield 3 x 2 x 1 = 6 changes, while 4 bells will yield 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 24 changes. The ! process does become rather surprising as you continue it for higher values of n: 5! = 120, and 6! = 720 – and you watch the number of changes increasing dramatically with the number of bells. ^[23]

When the number of bells is 10, Eno observed that the combination creates 3,628,800 interacting sequences. If a person were to ring out one of those sequences per day, it would take ten thousand years, which is exactly the time span of the Clock of the Long Now.^[24] The album’s title refers to the time and year at the mid-point between the record’s release and the date at which this sequence of bell-tone interactions would finish. Collaborating with Hillis—who provided the mathematical algorithm to figure out the particular tone sequence on a particular day—Eno created music that sounded out potential futures heard as a unique set of bells ringing from some imaginary tower. As Eno states, “the title track of the album features the synthesized bells played in each of the thirty-one sequences for the month of January in the year 07003.”^[25] In their article on some of Eno’s ideas behind his music, Austin Brown and Alex Mensing add that

Although the album itself is only seventy-five minutes in length, making it the shortest and most conventional piece of music I am exploring here, the soundscapes Eno created are a musical exploration of Danny Hillis’s clock and were inspired by the relationship between clocks, the generative music of change-ringing bells, and the sound programmed synthesizers recreating the sound of bells.^[26]

I agree with Eno that “it’s ironic that, at a time when humankind is at a peak of its technical powers, able to create huge global changes that will echo down the centuries, most of our social systems seem geared to increasingly short nows.”^[27] These three pieces are an attempt to use music and technology to push against the “short nows” of our world. Music joins other forms of artistic expression, which can stimulate our imaginations and bring us out of habits of thinking and feeling. Many of us are inundated with information and stimulation, bombarded with the proliferation of instant gratification offered by smart phones and computers. Through our commitments, we are typically focused on time spans of a week, a month, and (perhaps) a year. For many of us, our busy, technologically integrated lives keep us relegated to a series of “short nows.” These musical works attempt to use music and technology to push against the “short nows” filling the emails, calendars, calls, and schedules of everyday life and allow people to imaginatively hear music that will echo down the centuries.

There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong about a focus on the here and now, on living according to the more immediate demands of the day. But it is important to occasionally perform a mental zoom-out and think about how our busy lives flow within a vast network of other lives, both before and after we are alive. Zooming out even farther, our human network exists within a planetary ecology that has evolved for millennia. Speaking about his motivation for composing “Longplayer,” Finer writes that “at extremes of scale, time has always appeared to me as baffling, both in the transience of its passing on quantum mechanical levels and in the unfathomable expanses of geological and cosmological time, in which a human lifetime is reduced to no more than a blip.”^[28] In his book Deep Time Reckoning, Vincent Ialenti calls for “analogical thought experiments [that] can help us distance ourselves from our time-bound worlds, defamiliarize them, and imagine them afresh.”^[29] These musical works offer analogical sound experiments that push us out of ordinary understandings of musical performance and open the possibility of imagining the deep time involved in the formation of the planet that sustains us all.

 

Deep Time and Music: Decolonizing History Through Sound

“Deep time” refers to periods spanning millions of years that comprise the geological eras. McPhee observed that most people tend to “think in five generations—two ahead, two behind—with heavy concentration on the one in the middle.”^[30] The geological inspiration for deep time zooms out from this human-centric time scale to situate these five generations within a panoramic view. Deep time urges us to pull back from what McPhee describes as our “animal sense of time.”^[31]

But it can be difficult to move beyond this essential quality of our mammalian mind and perceive the immensity of time recorded in the earth’s mountains, valleys, and ocean floors. Geological time is not “readily comprehensible to minds used to thinking in terms of days, weeks, and years—decades at most.”^[32] One way to offer suggestions of other manners of perceiving is through artistic expression. Most musicians and the pieces they compose reside within these human time scales. Our preoccupation with short-term thinking and individual pursuits makes the belief in broad goals impacting humanity difficult. In his book The Time of Music, Jonathon Kramer writes that, “while we can have a sense of direction in our daily lives, it is difficult to maintain belief in large goals held by all of humanity.”^[33] These musical works open the possibility of reflecting on how and why these large goals feel challenging to maintain.

 

 

In the inner circle is the individual and their relationship to five generations—two before, two after, and one in the middle, of which that individual is an active member. The middle circle, which is larger, relates to how that individual views their relationship to history (including broad historical eras).^[40] The third and widest circle is represented by the geological eras of deep time, which make even the most epic historical period a tiny slice of vast time. The inner circle represents the biographical narrative we construct regarding our lives or the lives of others. The middle circle represents various attempts to form a linear, chronological narrative of events as they are influenced and affected by individuals. The outer circle of deep time relativizes both the middle and inner circles as attempts to form a narrative out of small moments within a much larger span of time.

Henry Gee’s book In Search of Deep Time (2000) begins with the author pointing out that the “scale of geological time . . . is so vast it defies narrative.” While the fossil record discovered by humans provides “primary evidence for the history of life . . . each fossil is an infinitesimal dot, lost in a fathomless sea of time, whose relationship with other fossils and organisms living in the present is obscure.”^[41] Humans use narrative to fill in the gaps to try piecing together a coherent story regarding the formation of the earth and the emergence and evolution of organic life. Importantly, Gee adds that “we invent these stories, after the fact, to justify the history of life according to our own prejudices.”^[42] Similarly, the study of history is, in some respects, a story invented to stitch together a complex intersection of people, places, events, and ideas into an evolutionary tale of human progress and development. The time span of human history is far less vast than the geological deep time supported by the fossils, but it parallels the same narrative structure. As Gee continues, “fossils are mute: their silence gives us unlimited license to tell their stories for them.”^[43]From the perspective of history, the voices of the colonized are often silenced (or left unheard). Traditional narratives of history divide time between pre- and post-colonial eras, effectively telling the stories of the colonized in the era before colonization occurred. In this story, the colonized are often mute, and the colonizers take the licence to create narratives of pre-colonial stasis as compared to the dynamism of historical progress (via imperialism, industrialization, and civilization).

Conclusion

Stewart Brand writes that “Eno’s Long Now places us where we belong, neither at the end of history nor at the beginning, but in the thick of it. We are not the culmination of history, and we are not start-over revolutionaries; we are in the middle of civilization’s story.”^[46] Such a view embeds us in a larger narrative. Music can help us feel that reality by placing us in a sonic relationship with what has come before and what will come after. I am interested in widening this perspective so that we can see past the boundaries of civilization’s story as merely one trajectory of one species on a planet that is billions of years old. The earth will continue supporting human life, or we will pursue a course of self-destruction. In both cases, the planet will survive for another few billion years. Listening to the time spans suggested by these musical pieces implies a long now that opens a pathway into a reckoning with deep time. This experience of reckoning can stimulate reflection on the colonial construct of history, allowing us to listen beyond the tumultuous sounds of modern progress so that we can hear other voices. These other voices have often been kept quiet or rendered silent by a Western chronological narrative. But these voices also include non-human sounds: the sounds of animals, the delicate groan of growing trees, and the nearly imperceptible shifting of tectonic plates.

These are far-reaching ideas, and I recognize that moving from a 639-year-long musical performance to the million-year cycles of deep time is a conceptual leap. However, I agree with Ialenti, who writes that “venturing to undertake deep time learning is more useful for cultivating long-term thinking than never embarking in the first place.”^[47] To reckon with deep time is to play with the idea that, while “human consciousness may have begun to leap and boil some sunny day in the Pleistocene . . . the race by and large has retained the essence of its animal sense of time.”^[48] Our mammalian brains have evolved to focus on short- term survival. McPhee is right to point out that we tend to think in five generations, situating ourselves in the very middle. But it is important to see how we might move beyond our evolutionary programming to consider how we as a species are integrated into a vast story of endless growth and change. The performance of a piece of music that takes longer than an average human lifetime to play out can shift our relationship to the organized sounds of music, extending our awareness beyond the human-centric paradigm of conventional musical performances embedded in Western traditions. This extended awareness can then carry over into an expansion outward from the human-centric narrative of history to a planetary scale that is millions of years old.

Works of art—including the musical works explored here—can provide cognitive and sensual experiences that offer opportunities to be pushed out of ordinary modes of understanding time. I agree with Eno when he writes that

What is possible in art becomes thinkable in life. We become our new selves first in simulacrum, through style and fashion and art, our deliberate immersions in virtual worlds. . . . We rehearse new feelings and sensitivities. We imagine other ways of thinking about our world and its future.^[49]

The pieces of music I have explored here offer virtual worlds where we can imagine out beyond history and into deep time. Beyond pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial categories, deep time is a virtual world of erupting volcanoes, devastating earthquakes, crumbling mountains, and rising oceans. But deep time is also a world that includes us. Eno once said that “evolving metaphors, in my opinion, is what artists do.”^[50] The humanely organized sounds of music can work to evolve the metaphor of history by situating it within a reckoning with deep time.

These questions of deep time prompt further questions. Will there still be humans born on this planet in five hundred years? Will there still be human ears to hear? Will people still be around to understand and follow Cage’s score and successfully change the organ notes on time? It can be difficult to imagine what humans might be doing in a thousand years. But music offers a poignant way to reimagine our relationship with each other and to the distant future. By envisioning how we are embedded in a vast and complex story involving rocks, plants, animals, and people, we can be inspired to care for the role we play in shaping the earth’s future so that subsequent generations have the opportunity to hear the final notes of “As Slow as Possible,” or listen to the first loop of the next cycle of “Longplayer” begin on January 1, 3000.