CMC awarded Community Heritage Grant from The Heritage Council/An Chomhairle Oidhreachta

Contemporary Music Centre is pleased to announce that, following a competitive application process, a Heritage Council/An Chomhairle Oidhreachta Community Heritage grant has been awarded to CMC's Sound Archive. This Community Heritage grant will enable the digitisation of almost 400 cassettes in CMC's archive, which contain unique recordings of music by contemporary composers from Ireland.

These cassettes are over twenty years old and, though they are carefully stored in CMC's archive, are beginning to show signs of degradation, such as print-through, also known as pre-echo, where a low-level transfer of material occurs from one layer of tape to the next. Fuaimlann, the specialist audio digitisation company will complete this digitisation, following on from CMC's previous 2018 Digitisation Project (funded by Dept of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht/Creative Ireland).

This collection of cassettes often include the only publicly-accessible recordings of music by contemporary composers from Ireland. Many of the recordings document the premiere performance of these works. By digitising these cassettes these works will now be safeguarded and conserved for the future. Digitised recordings will be more easily accessible to CMC Library users, increasing the awareness and recognition of works by composers from Ireland.