Metamorphosis of Media in the Life of Audio Documents: Preservation, Restoration, and Critical Editing of Twentieth-Century Western Art Music

The preservation, restoration, and critical editing of musical works from the Western art tradition composed entirely or partially on audio media poses significant challenges for music scholars, editors, engineers, and archivists. These include understanding the various technologies composers have used in their work, making sense of the array of audio tools and media available today to restore and reissue electronic music, and confronting the underlying theoretical and philosophical issues that such projects necessarily entail. Focusing on the work of scholars based in North America and Western Europe, this article will discuss English, French, and Italian language literatures in musicology, philology, literary criticism, and philosophy, as well as work in engineering, information theory, and theories of communication systems, to reflect on the nature of electronic music compositions and the metamorphoses that such compositions undergo in the process of their transmission through various kinds of media. After discussing a number of recent editing and restoration projects, the article argues that the transmission of audio documents depends on the “diasystemic” interaction of a work’s original media and the new media into which it is transferred. It suggests that attempts to identify and preserve audio documents according to a “best copy” standard denies both the historicity of musical production and our knowledge about it, and that recorded musical works are inseparable from their media transformations.