10 years later

Every archive is inherently incomplete and fragile. The very act of archiving involves selection: something is kept, something is discarded. This is why archives are not neutral, but construct narratives that bear the traces of the choices made. We all have our own personal archive: our memory. Personal memory goes far beyond the metaphor of the archive; it is not static but constantly evolving, we remember and forget, we preserve what has been but also the possibilities that have not been realised, our dreams, and we continually give new meanings to everything. When we think we cannot remember, we search through our papers or digital memories.

From an email dated 5 February 2016 to Etienne Reymond (then artistic director of LuganoMusica): ‘Dear Etienne, I hope all is well. I have just finished a 14-minute piece for solo trombone (a real nightmare!! – luckily it's finished). I am continuing with the planning of the electroacoustic music project in collaboration with LuganoMusica. I am attaching the latest draft outline of the contents. [...]’.

In September of the same year, EAR's first concert saw the light of day in the then practically new Teatrostudio hall of the LAC. In January 2026, ten years will have passed since this timid beginning, which certainly did not expect to last so long. To date, there are not many examples in Europe of concert cycles dedicated to acousmatic music. EAR has carved out a small space for itself. We have hosted, both physically and virtually, composers from France, Switzerland, Argentina, Germany, Italy, England, Spain, Canada, the United States, and I am sure I am forgetting some. An archive of pieces, experiences, collections of sounds and places that had probably never been heard in Lugano before.

Our region, in addition to hosting the headquarters of the Fonoteca Nazionale, Switzerland's sound archive, with the Experimental Studio of Electroacoustics founded by Hermann Scherchen in 1954 in Gravesano, is also the birthplace of electronic music in Switzerland. What happened in Gravesano had an international impact for more than a decade, thanks to the research carried out there, the conferences and publications, and the personalities who came into contact with this reality: Pierre Schaeffer, Luigi Nono, Luciano Berio, Abraham Moles, Iannis Xenakis, Luc Ferrari, Jean François Mâche and others.

We begin this tenth cycle of concerts with a new addition to the concerts, in the form of a “listening guide”. Already envisaged in the original project, it had never actually materialised; it will be a new challenge. We will start again with a piece by Bernard Parmegiani, which was featured in the inaugural concert in 2016 and whose title itself conveys the sense of investigating the world through listening: De natura sonorum (1974).

EAR's ambition for the future is to become a “living archive”, which is renewed and grows from concert to concert, transforming preservation into a creative act, reconfiguring the past through the present and producing new interpretations.

Our personal memory of sounds, but this also applies to everything else, is not a simple collection of documents, it does not live in its digital forms, which mostly lie abandoned on some computer or in some cloud, but constitutes the world of possibilities of things we can hear and imagine, in our constant struggle between the desire to preserve and the inevitability of loss, between past and future.

We are grateful to those who have enabled us to carry out this project and to the foresight of those who, even today, believe that it is something worth continuing, perhaps for another ten years!

– Nadir Vassena