Jody Berland and William Echard Music and Memory at the Millennium Of all the arts, music is the medium that most constantly nurtures and cajoles our memory. It is music that weaves together our personal memories with the fabric of the collective past. In Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1985), Jacques Attali makes the influential argument that music also has the power to encapsulate in its form the seeds of future experience and social change. As the new technologies of music dis- semination fragment our musical experiences and memories, and memory itself becomes the focus of extensive psychological and scholarly contention, what does contemporary musical practice augur for our future in terms of culture, identity, or the sharing of social life? Our understanding of how music shapes our perception of past and future has been complicated by a number of events, above all by the evolution of sound recording and its creation of the "archive," which has come to represent individual and collective memory. The subsequent emergence of digital techniques has greatly accelerated the use of musical archives as symbolic and material resources within the composition of music, as well as a seemingly endless dissemination of musical commodities in an increasingly fragmented social space. Today, both the reiteration or "preservation" of traditional forms and the transformation of all musical forms and genres by new digital techniques and practices are celebrated as worthy artistic and cultural achievements. This project seeks to bring together a number of essays and musical compositions that explore the complex interactions between memory, social and technological change, and the future of cultural tradition within diverse Canadian musical practices and communities. As editors, we wish to use the occasion of the millennium to explore the creation and re-creation of our musical landscape. Both this issue of Topia and the following combine music and writing that draws our attention to music's role in treat- ing both the past and the future. By combining academic writings, artists' works, and artists' own commentaries on these works, we have sought to incorporate and juxta-