27/10/2025 à 05:41

Dear colleagues,

Thanks again for signing the petition “ICMPC/ESCOM 2027 must be inclusive and sustainable”. The list of signatories was submitted on 27.8.25. Two months later, no answer has arrived. If and when it arrives, I'll forward it straight away.

A week ago, on 20.10.25, the president of ESCOM wrote that a response letter had been prepared and asked me how it could be sent directly to the signatories. I replied that a pdf could be sent to me and I would forward it to the signatories as an attachment.

Instead of that, I received an invitation to a General Assembly of ESCOM to be held on 24 November 2025 at 10:30 am UTC/GMT (11:30 in central Europe, 12:30 in Finland). If you are a member of ESCOM, please participate!

In the agenda is the sentence “ESCOM 2027, together with ICMPC, will be organized by the University of Jyväskylä, in Helsinki and Online.” In other words, the ESCOM executive is going ahead with an exclusive carbon-bomb conference in the midst of a global climate and equity crisis, contradicting the wishes of probably over half of its members and of academic colleagues in music perception and cognition worldwide.

In fact, a virtual conference is always possible and the multi-hub option is not difficult. We have done it before, the technology is gradually getting easier and faster (and is in any case the same for a single-location conference with remote presentations), there are peer-reviewed academic publications about the details, and I have a preliminary list of 15 colleagues who would help organize hubs in 2027 or find hub organizers on all inhabited continents (far more than we need).

If your career is affected by this decision, could you send me a few lines about it? Or let me know about other consequences for you or other academic colleagues? Perhaps you have junior colleagues who are affected but fear career consequences if they speak out? Less than 100 words please. Your statement should be anonymous. If I receive ten or more replies, I will forward them, anonymously.

This conflict has far-reaching implications for conferences in all academic disciplines. So please also let me know if you hear about related discussions in other disciplines. To my knowledge the APA is still deep in denial, but that could change at any time, and the same applies to musicology.

I’m grateful for feedback of any kind, so don’t hesitate to let me know what you’re thinking.

Yours
Richard
parncutt at uni-graz.at