After the Music: Context, Loss, and the Digital Archive

[This is a part of a paper I presented at a music and archive conference that my collegue and I organised in 2022.]

A musical phrase never sounds the same twice. Even when the notes are identical, the room changes it. The air, the walls, the way light falls across the floor. Music is never only the arrangement of sounds. It is the environment that receives it. It is the history that haunts the moment of listening.

In physical archives, this was understood without needing to be said. A vinyl record was not just the recording; it was the hiss, the warp, the weight in the hand. A manuscript was not just the words; it was the ink, the margin notes, the paper that thinned with time. Materiality was not a supplement to meaning. It was part of meaning itself. Digitisation changed that. When a piece of music is digitised, it loses its physical trace. The crackle of the record might be preserved, but the record itself — the thickness of the shellac, the wear on the label, the particular way a stylus sank into the groove — is gone. The object becomes weightless. The context must be rebuilt, or it disappears.

This is not a problem of fidelity. It is a problem of structure. In the physical archive, relationships were implicit. Objects lived beside each other. Their proximity was part of their meaning. A letter filed next to a photograph. A studio recording stored alongside its handwritten score. Context was not something added later. It was part of how the archive breathed. In the digital archive, objects arrive alone. The search bar replaces the collection. Retrieval replaces relation. We find what we ask for, but we lose everything we did not know to seek. Without proximity, without environment, the digital object becomes strangely mute. It exists, but it does not speak of where it came from, or what it once touched.

To rebuild that lost context, we need to think differently about structure. Not as a hierarchy — not as files neatly sorted into boxes — but as a network of relations. What Ted Nelson called intertwingularity: the refusal of things to fit cleanly into categories. Everything connects, but not along straight lines. Context is not a container. It is a weave. A piece of music, digitised, can be linked not just to its metadata — composer, performer, date — but to its history of performances, to the venues it filled, to the poems it borrowed, to the other voices that once sang its lines. It can be mapped across time, across place, across influence. Not sequenced, but woven.

Models like FRBR help formalise this. They remind us that the work is not the recording. That the expression is not the manifestation. That what we hold in the digital archive is not the original, but a trace — a point in a larger, moving constellation. Rebuilding context in the digital domain is not about restoring what was lost. It is about reimagining what connection can mean.

Walter Benjamin's Angel of History watches as the debris of the past piles up before it, unable to stop the storm of progress that drives it into the future. The archive, physical or digital, is a small refusal against that storm. A gathering of fragments. A weaving of broken threads into something that can still be held. We will not save everything. But we can make new patterns from what remains.