It is with great sadness that we record the passing of Dr Irène Deliège (née Jeanne Smismans) in Ixelles, Brussels on 11 May 2024. Irène became a major enabling figure in the academic research field of psychology of music. She leaves behind her work that has become classic, and institutions that remain at the heart of research in the cognitive sciences of music.
Beginnings
Irène was born Jeanne Smismans near Hal, in Flanders, on 15 January 1933. She lived her early years speaking Flemish Dutch, but, to succeed in Belgium of that era, one needed to speak French, and so teenage Irène decided to do so. She walked for almost an hour in each direction, every school day, in order to be taught in French, in a neighboring village across the border with Wallonia.
Her parents strongly supported her education, and music lessons were arranged—although Irène had to be coaxed back after first rejecting her music teacher (not the other way round!) on grounds of poor quality.
Irène’s childhood was of course deeply affected by the Second World War, during which time Belgium was occupied by the Nazis. She told only a few people that she suffered for her whole life from post-traumatic stress, resulting from a near-death experience with an Allied bomb in the garden of her parents’ home.
Having shown a natural aptitude for music throughout her childhood, she opted to study music theory, and in the early 1950s, she was awarded her diploma from the Royal Conservatory of Brussels. There, she took classes with André Souris, a major figure of surrealism and of Belgian musicology. Souris evidently recognized Irène’s potential: he recommended that she attend the prestigious Darmstadt Summer School, which was then the central focus of the European musical avant-garde. She studied at Darmstadt with Olivier Messiaen, and met several life-long musical friends.
The Darmstadt experience proved critical in more ways than one: not only did it inform and stimulate Irène’s passionate interest in music as an art and cultural form, and as a human cognitive phenomenon; it also introduced her to her future husband, Célestin, and provided the Best Man for their wedding, Pierre Boulez.
In 1954, having returned to Brussels, Irène took her first professional position teaching music in secondary school, and devoted her personal life to supporting Célestin, who was already established as a leading European musicologist. They shared a life of music until Célestin’s death in 2010.
But someone as intensely intellectual and creative as Irène Deliège needs to exercise that creativity, and as time went on, she did so, beyond her continuing support of Célestin. In the early 1960s, Irène decided to learn to cook. Unlike most people, who would perhaps buy a book, or take an evening course, Irène opted for an extended internship in a leading Parisian restaurant, Le Prunier, which still delights its guests today, just as Irène delighted her own guests with her excellent cuisine, almost to the end of her days. Culinary creativity, however, was not enough for this extraordinary woman.
Academia
In 1981, at the age of 49, Irène decided to study for a master’s degree in psychology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, having taken the decision to leave her job as a school music teacher. She achieved excellent grades, and was therefore permitted to study for a doctorate at the University of Liège, under the supervision of Professor Marc Richelle.
Richelle entrusted her with the supervision of a newly formed Music Psychology Research Unit (URPM). It is in this context that, in 1991, she defended her doctoral thesis entitled The psychological organization of musical listening. Marks of sedimentation—index, imprint—in the mental representation of the work. She proposed a theoretical model that is deeply original, supported by numerous empirical tests of the listeners’ perception of the form of a musical work in real time, undertaken on impressive numbers of participants.
Her research also took a radically cognitive-scientific approach to music, seeking to understand the cognitive mechanism of music. Her theory of Cue Abstraction reads in many ways like a computer science thesis, with its mechanistic hypotheses and explanations, even though it is also firmly grounded in the empirical world of psychology. Her doctorate most clearly demonstrates her extraordinary vision. In addition to experiments on musical stimuli, Irène proposed a whole cognitive architecture of interconnected systems relating to human memory, recall, semiotic understanding, and music, and hypothesized how they might cooperate. It presents clearly designed and thorough tests of the basic premises of the theory, and thus presents a shining example of how reductionist science needs to work: precise, detailed, painstaking study at the empirical level, but never forgetting that after reduction, one needs to assemble the pieces, to have the big picture.
Irène’s research was unusual in another important way: because of a deep interest, shared with Célestin, in 20th-century non-tonal music, she continued her studies into, for example, the work of Luciano Berio, extending her cognitive theory beyond the common-practice music that constitutes the vast majority of subject matter in music psychology. Comparisons between these very different kinds of music have great potential for teasing apart the multiplicity of cognitive effects in music perception and thus helping us to see the underlying mechanisms that are both common to all and specialized to some.
ESCOM
In parallel with her research work, Irène became aware of the institutional void in which the field of cognitive music sciences found itself at the time. International meetings devoted to the sciences of music only began to happen with any regularity in the late 1980s. Through the contacts Irène made at these early meetings she built around herself the collegial support to co-organize the first international conference on this subject on European soil, in Paris in 1988. She never proposed anything lightly or speculatively, and it soon became clear this was just one early manifestation of a much broader and longer-term agenda, to ensure the widest circulation of ideas among the different intellectual cultures and language groups that contribute to the sciences of music. By 1990, she had built around her the group that forged the constitution of ESCOM, and launched the society at a historic first conference in Trieste in 1991.
This was historic for two reasons. Coming so shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, it was one of the earliest occasions where colleagues from Eastern Europe could participate freely and equally, such participation remaining to this day a strong and vital element of ESCOM. Second, this society—encompassing for the first time the whole of our continent—was proposed (and accepted) as an equal third partner in the newly formed series of International Conferences on Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC), whose other two axes were the Americas and the countries of the Asia-Pacific region. Irène’s personal advocacy and credibility was undoubtedly the decisive factor in ensuring that ESCOM became firmly established as the regular third host in the cycle of biennial ICMPC meetings around the world that has continued ever since. Irène founded ESCOM in her own image: she wanted to promote the broadest, most interdisciplinary view of the cognitive sciences of music.
A new interdisciplinary journal: Musicæ Scientiæ
It was with this interdisciplinary vision in mind that Irene drew together the forces required to inaugurate, in 1996, the first pan-European, multidisciplinary and multilingual peer-reviewed journal Musicæ Scientiæ, which is now a secure and respected publication, published by SAGE since 2011. The journal is immediately recognizable in the music science community, with its distinctive cover motif (also designed with Irène’s acute input). She remained editor until her retirement in 2009, which was marked by a special issue put together in her honor, containing 15 papers authored by scholars all over the world who were influenced by her work. It also contains a complete list of her publications and the meetings she organized.
Retirement but not retirement—the translation fund
After her retirement in 2009, Irène retained the strongest interest In ESCOM’s affairs, and for some years hosted ESCOM Executive Committee meetings in her home in Brussels, a generous gesture much appreciated by successive committees. Her retirement gift to ESCOM was the foundation of the Irène Deliège Translation Fund (https://www.escomsociety.org/publications).
Through this series, she personally funded English translations of books that were previously unavailable to Anglophone scholars. Typically, her approach was not to complain at the barriers of language—instead, she simply chose to fix the problem. This series has now seen the first publication in English of five seminal historically important monographs, with two more in progress, to add to her legacy in due course.
She never lost her sharp interest in, and acumen for, developments in ESCOM and our wider discipline. Indeed, it was only 11 days before her death that she formally approved the latest translation project, just now begun.
Legacy
Having radically reinvented herself as a cognitive scientist, via nine years of hard work, Irène was sometimes impatient with colleagues whom she felt were insufficiently interdisciplinary, and thence naive about their treatment of music. And she was no less demanding of musicians and musicologists, or computer scientists, who might approach psychology in a naive way. Good news, then, that nowadays, interdisciplinary education is available, and, of course, it exists in no small part due to Irène’s groundbreaking efforts to create a coherent research field.
Above all, Irène Deliège was an interdisciplinarian: a true musician, a true scientist, and a true philosopher. We, ESCOM, and music psychology as a whole, will miss her.
Valérie Dufour, John Sloboda and Geraint A. Wiggins
