The Auerbach Living Archive (ALA) is established to preserve, curate, and activate the complete creative record of composer, writer, and visual artist Lera Auerbach. ALA captures her compositions, manuscripts, sketches, visual diaries, correspondence, and related materials in real time, ensuring their preservation in accordance with the highest professional archival, scholarly, and digital preservation standards. Through rigorous documentation, cataloging, and stewardship, ALA safeguards both finished works and the evolving creative process, ensuring their long-term accessibility, integrity, and permanence as part of humanity’s cultural and intellectual heritage.
At a pivotal historical threshold defined by profound technological transformation, ALA further seeks to preserve and illuminate artistic creation as an irreducibly human act, shaped by consciousness, memory, and lived experience. This archive preserves the work of an artist formed within an unbroken lineage of human creative tradition, and among the last generation whose artistic voice developed entirely through direct human experience. Through its preservation, fellowship, and dissemination efforts, ALA ensures that such creative expression remains accessible, intelligible, and alive for future generations.
In addition to preservation, ALA advances research, interpretation, and creative engagement through structured fellowship programs, scholarly access, and public initiatives. Fellows, scholars, performers, and interdisciplinary researchers are supported in the study, annotation, and reinterpretation of the archive, ensuring that its contents remain active, generative, and continuously engaged with the present. In this way, ALA transforms the archive from a static repository into a living center of intellectual and artistic activity.
ALA seeks to establish a new institutional model for the living archive, in which preservation, scholarship, and creative activation function as an integrated and continuous process. By developing and disseminating replicable archival methodologies, digital preservation standards, and open-access tools, ALA provides a framework that can be adopted by other institutions seeking to preserve and activate creative legacies in real time.