Thanks again for supporting the petition “ICMPC/ESCOM 2027 must be inclusive and sustainable". I finally received a response to our petition from the ESCOM and ICMPC committees.
It’s an impressive example of denial, of both privilege and emissions. One gets the impression that research on music perception and cognition (or even just conference tourism) is more important than the future of humanity.
For climate activists, the style of writing is familiar. In the research literature on climate denial, this kind of discourse is called virtue signalling, tokenism, green sheen, sustainability rhetoric, performative environmentalism, or simply empty promises.
I noticed two specific problems:
1. The text repeatedly expresses concern without plausibly promising corresponding action. For example, there is no commitment to emissions transparency through independently controlled carbon accounting. That would reveal yet another high-carbon conference, like the last two ICMPCs.
2. The text focuses on small issues, ignoring big ones as if they don’t exist. The authors are pretending not to see the “elephant in the room” – the one we described in the petition text.
Meanwhile, 15 colleagues have offered to organize hubs or help find hub organizers in their regions. We only need about 7 hubs. Several multi-hub conferences have been held successfully, and there are good peer-reviewed papers on the organizational detail.
One gets the impression that the real reason for clinging to a 20th-century conference tradition is not being stated.
Please let me know your thoughts. It helps me a lot to get your feedback and personal viewpoints.
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.
Today I wrote to the chair of ESCOM, and to the ESCOM and ICMPC committees, with a request for a response to our petition. See attached pdf. Thanks again for your support.
Bad news I’m afraid. The ICMPC executive committee has decided to go ahead with the ESCOM proposal for a single-location conference in Helsinki in 2027. The decision was unclear until the end. One member of the committee decided at the last minute.
This petition and the 100 colleagues who signed it were essentially ignored. The same goes for the 10 colleagues who would have helped organize hubs, and the 100s who would have benefited from those hubs. All ignored! And that’s not even mentioning the victims of global warming.
For your interest, the 6 members of the ICMPC executive committee are listed here: icmpc.org/icmpc_advisory.html. Scroll to the end.
Four of these six colleagues supported the ESCOM proposal for yet another single-location conference. Before doing that, they were reminded repeatedly about this petition and the 100 people who signed it. But they refused even to discuss the issues. In the end, the petition was supported only by the chair of the committee and myself.
The membership of the committee changes after every conference. The ICMPC in Brazil just happened. (I was not there, because I stopped flying to conferences in 2016.) I will now leave the committee and the organiser of the Brazil conference will join. The chair of the committee is generally the organiser of the second-last conference, so the chair will also change. If the committee was previously dominated by deniers, it will soon be even worse.
But this is not the end of this project. In fact, we are just getting started. History is certainly on our side. There are several possible ways to proceed. Please let me know how you think we might force the organizers to respect human rights. I need your suggestions!
The ICMPC executive committee has decided to go ahead with the ESCOM proposal for a single-location conference in Helsinki in 2027.
This petition and the 100 colleagues who signed it were ignored. The same goes for the 10 colleagues who would have helped organize hubs, and the 100s who would have benefited from those hubs. And that’s not even mentioning the victims of global warming.
The four of these six colleagues who supported another single-location conference were reminded repeatedly about this petition and the 100 people who signed it but refused to discuss the issues.
The petition was supported by the chair of the committee and myself.
For your interest, the committee will soon change. I will leave and the organiser of the conference that just finished in Brazil will join. The chair is the organiser of the second-last conference, so the chair will also change.
This is not the end. Please send me ideas about how best to proceed.
at the end of “reason”, i added some instructions for signers. there is no change to the actual petition text
Neue Begründung:
The negative effects of global warming (e.g., droughts, floods, fires, heat waves, extreme weather) are gradually worsening, exacerbating disease, hunger, migration, and conflict. At the same time, the gap between rich and poor is widening; the Global South is suffering more than the North. The most affected regions are gradually becoming uninhabitable. Political and corporate responses are inadequate.
Academics in all disciplines have a special responsibility, given our ability to evaluate academic work across disciplines. Apart from contributing academic content, we must urgently reduce our own emissions. Aviation represents more than half of the global warming impact of a typical university, if the radiative forcing index for aviation (roughly 2.7) is considered and all business and private flights of staff and students are included. Single-location conferences may contradict the climate policies or equity goals of our academic societies, universities, or countries. Our principled position on this issue goes beyond the next conference, drawing academic attention to issues of human responsibility and survival.
When signing, please:
include your affiliation under address,
briefly explain why you are signing (qualitative data!), and
at the end, check your name appears under “signers”.
We need signatures that are verifiably from the music perception and cognition community, so ensure your signature is public. Note that changes to your entries are possible even after signing.
A new paper about multi-hub conferences has just appeared. I tried to address the main issues that arose in ICMPC executive committee discussions in the past few years.
Parncutt, R. (2025). The global multi-hub conference: Inclusion, sustainability, and academic politics. Sustainable Futures. doi.org/10.1016/j.sftr.2025.100915
This program sketch gives a feel for what a multi-hub conference would be like. At each location, people would experience two 4-hour slots per day, separated by a 4-hour siesta. Throughout the 8-hour working day, there would be a mixture of live and virtual interaction. During the early slot, there would be a mixture of local presentations and remote presentations from locations toward the north, south, and east. During the late slot, from the north, south, and west.
To my knowledge, ESCOM, DGM (in Germany) and AEPMIM (in Spain) have informed their members about the petition. If you belong to another regional society in the area of music perception and cognition, please ensure that your colleagues are informed.
