Conference Agenda

The proliferation of digital tools has transformed the compositional process over the past thirty years. Composers digitally notate, transcribe, create and augment their musical works. Likewise, composers’ lives and creative output are increasingly documented online and in digital formats. Yet, the obsolescence of hardware and software, compounded by dependence on constantly shifting proprietary software, the fragility and variety of digital file formats and media prone to degradation, and the poor retention of metadata and documentation put this material at risk.

The compositional process, frequently the source of study in physical sketches and manuscripts, will become further obscured, and our collective cultural knowledge and study of contemporary composers, which represent a much more diverse canon than in previous generations, will be lost without significant intervention. Furthermore, premieres, reviews, recordings, and ephemera captured, published, and stored in digital means provide the basis for analysis of a composer and their work in relation to the cultural milieu. While many composers now take steps to preserve their own materials until such time as they donate or bequeath them to a memory institution, they often depend on a variety of advice or piecemeal personal practices, which over time can pose real danger to preservation efforts.

This roundtable will bring together the “three-legged-stool” of stakeholders–composers, archivists, and music researchers—to discuss the downstream effects of preservation on research. Discussion will include the synthesized results of survey-based research on composers’ working practices and preservation workflows, as well as archivist-developed tools to increase ongoing access. Generating constructive conversations between these communities enables the ongoing creation of resources to maintain and expand research on contemporary works.