What worries musicologists
Why BeethovenA field that has long abandoned its core studies is now fretting over holding smaller conferences and decolonising itself.
Read this:
On Behalf Of Parncutt, Richard ([email protected])
Sent: 09 July 2025 11:02
To: [email protected]
Subject: [MUSICOLOGY-ALL] Organizing a sustainable, inclusive international conference: The multi-hub option
Dear colleagues,
Allow me to draw your attention to a new article:
Parncutt, R. (2025). The global multi-hub conference: Inclusion, sustainability, and academic politics. Sustainable Futures, 100915.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666188825004800
The idea is to radically change the structure of larger international academic conferences, substantially reducing emissions while at the same time substantially improving inclusion (DEI) and maintaining constant face-to-face contact within hubs. Given the worsening global climate crisis, combined with increasing inequality and awareness of the need to decolonize academic disciplines, there are now strong ethical arguments for reform.
Such a reform would not affect academic quality. If anything, quality will improve if colleagues with more diverse cultural backgrounds are included, and if the conference hubs that are established on different continents have the same status (without a central location or hub hierarchy). As for the “conference experience”, it will inevitably change. In some ways it will be better, in others worse. We need to see the glass as half full and not as half empty.
If anyone is considering a big international conference in the coming few years, please contact me to talk about the possibility of a multi-hub format. I can help with practical issues, on behalf of my university.
https://klimaneutral.uni-graz.at/en/our-research/the-global-multi-hub-academic-conference/
Yours sincerely,
Richard Parncutt
University of Graz, Austria
pictured: Mahler’s friend Guido Adler, father of modern musicology
Guido Adler (photo) has done far more for musical practice than any contemporary musicologist. Let’s keep his work and that of other benign musicologists, and abolish funding for intersectional decolonial rap scholars, or what you want to call them.
I did not see one word about music in this DEI musicology letter.
Could this be because the letter and article are not actually about music?
These are the guys that will be scrutinising their navels long after the water has risen to their neck line.
Oh dear
Ih… ih… dal ridere sto per schiattar
Adler, as did Mahler, faced pernicious discrimination for his Jewish heritage.
I wonder if someone actually cared to read the paper…
Basically
1 the issue has nothing to do with music or musicology: it is valid for any academic discipline where large international conferences are part of the day to day work.
2 the concepts expressed in the paper are actually true and the idea reasonable. Although I prefer in person large meetings (which I often attend as part of my job), smaller meetings organised in regional hubs may indeed have advantages.
I don’t really see the need for the mocking here.
Huh? What could you possibly find deeply objectionable about this article?
Richard is a music researcher, yes, but the article is about different modes of delivery for international academic conferences — not about musicology at all.
Pairing this blurb with a picture of Adler is deliberately obtuse (but admittedly effective, seeing many of the comments here).
The concern about in-person international conferences is shared among just about all disciplines in the humanities and sciences. It’s a matter of trying to retain the benefits of face-to-face meetings while reducing the carbon footprints of on-site meetings of thousands of participants. And it has nothing to do with the subjects of present-day musicology, whether music-theoretical or sociological in nature.