COLLECTING IS A CULTURAL PRACTICE characterized by an uncanny dialectic of violence and preservation. It willfully tears helpless objects out of their original and presumably “natural” context in order to integrate them into the new framework of the collection, whose selection criteria, values, and goals reflect the individual collector's subjectivity or the policies of cultural-political institutions like museums and archives. In many ways, collecting is the desperate attempt to reign in the dispersion, fragmentariness, and enigmatic aura of artifacts that seem to have an elusive life of their own. In his “Passagen-Werk” (Arcades Project, 1927–40), Walter Benjamin sketched a general theory of collecting that points to the illusory nature of this practice. In fragment H 4 a, 1, he juxtaposes the archetype of the modern collector with the Baroque allegorist. These supplementary types are defined by differences while also sharing some of each other's attributes. The “most deeply hidden motive” of the collector, Benjamin suggests, is his “struggle against dispersion.” Collecting is motivated by the futile attempt to impose an order and a systematic meaning over the widely scattered objects of the collector's fascination; this order, however, is something the allegorist's passionate gaze of reflective contemplation, willfully dislodging things from their original contexts, has long abandoned. But, as Benjamin stresses, “in every collector hides an allegorist, and in every allegorist a collector.” What the collector shares with the allegorist is the acknowledgment that a collection can never be complete. His discovery of “just a single piece missing” reveals that the collection “remains a patchwork,” resembling the ruinous landscape of dispersed fragments pondered by the melancholic allegorist. Conversely, the allegorist, intent on deciphering objects as “keywords in a secret dictionary,” shares with the collector the intimation that he “can never have enough of things”: harboring, in other words, an unfulfillable desire for ideal completion, order, and shared significances.

This dialectic of assemblage and dispersal applies equally to the gathering of pictorial objects (pictures, sculptures, coins, stamps, etc.) and textual documents (books, autographs, newspaper articles, and so on). But does it also apply to sonic phenomena, especially to music? Can music be collected, and if so, in what form and in what ways? What are the implications with regard to aesthetic value, social function, and mediatechnological reproduction when music is considered in terms of collectibility?