Picture: David Steingrüber
The German Music Archive in Berlin is the nation’s central collection of sheet music, music supplies and sound recording media, as well as Germany’s musical-bibliographical information centre. Founded in 1970, it continues the activities of the German Music/Sound Library (1961 – 1969). The German Music Archive in Berlin is a department of the German National Library, which is located in Leipzig, and will be moving to Leipzig when the fourth extension building there is finished. One attractive special collection of the German Music Archive is its accumulation of apparatuses for recording and playing sound, which will be newly presented in its cultural-historical context in Leipzig.
The transfer of the German Music Archive to Leipzig will go hand in hand with a new concept for the presentation of the collection of acoustic apparatuses and related storage media. The changeable, rapid development from the Edison-apparatus to digital storage and reproduction of music and sound lends form to the presentation’s chronological framework. This theme per se suggests an approach to the objects via modern media. The layout of the exhibition is being conceived in cooperation with the architects of the fourth extension to the German National Library Leipzig, the working group Gabriele Glöckler / ZSP Architekten, Stuttgart.