Systematising (at) the Present for the Future: Reflections on Archiving Electroacoustic Music

Abstract

Archiving electroacoustic music means dealing with new challenges that arise from the specificities of the sources. While all archiving approaches include the processes of categorising, selecting, and maintaining materials, as well as the question of how to provide access to the archived sources, technology-based artistic formats always require an extra consideration of the state of technology embedded, as the criteria for these processes face new questions, goals, and mechanisms. This article outlines two possible perspectives on archiving electroacoustic music, focussing especially on challenges and approaches connected to the technologies embedded in electroacoustic music compositions from the 1980s and 1990s.