Digitization of historial music archives: Preserving the past, embracing the future

Cultural institutions dealing with music (opera houses, conservatories, public and private collections, etc.) often hold huge archives made of music-related heterogeneous materials. These subjects can greatly benefit from digitization campaigns and the consequent adoption of ICT techniques as it regards not only the preservation, but also the exploitation and revivification of their content. This paper, that summarizes the keynote speech held at the 3rd International Conference on Technologies for Music Notation and Representation (TENOR 2017), starts from the experiences of the Teatro alla Scala and the Ricordi Historical Archive in order to show the new possibilities emerging from the adoption of computer-based technologies and approaches.