Introduction: Preserving Electroacoustic Music

Despite its youth, it is necessary to preserve electroacoustic music, since these works are less durable than other cultural heritages, and their maintenance and restoration give different problems than they usually give. In order to keep the electroacoustic music culture alive, binding interventions are required, conducted from the inside by specific institutions and with the contribution of experts in the field. The brief life of the audio storage supports, the reading systems of the data, and the instruments, impose that these interventions are rapid, thus avoiding that the works which have been heavily deteriorated are definitely lost. In regards to the instruments, many technological generations overlap in the history of the electrophone instruments, and many electronic components, fundamentals for the functioning of the instruments, are not easily available. The preservation presupposes the presence of several experts in the field and the need of specific researches, because the damage done by a bad conservator or through inadequate restoration is irreversible. So, these activities must be scheduled and made inside an institutional framework, with adequate funds and with an interdisciplinary planning. The work is considerable. In fact, the number of electroacoustic music works has surely increased: already in 1967 Hugh Davies catalogued around 5000 electroacoustic music works in the world. Nonetheless, the need to sound an alarm lives side by side with the optimism generated by the interest this problem has caused, among other factors. One has to be conscious of the precarious passive conservation of the cultural heritage in the recent past, seen in the reports presented in this issue. 2. Different sides of Electroacoustic Music