Irène Deliège, founder of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM) and founding editor of its journal, Musicae Scientiae, died on 11 May 2024. Born in 1933 in Flanders, she was immersed in music from an early age; she studied piano at the Conservatoire royale de Bruxelles, becoming intrigued by musical avant-garde thinking. This resulted in her attending the Darmstadt Ferienkurse in 1953 at which she met, and the following year married, the rising star of Belgian musicology, Celestin Deliège (1922-2010), the best man at their wedding being Pierre Boulez. Irène subsequently worked as a music teacher until changing career to pursue a psychology degree at the Université libre de Bruxelles, graduating in 1984. She completed a PhD in 1991 at the Université de Liège, teaching and conducting research there in the psychology of music from 1984 and retiring formally in 1997. Aligned with her academic interests, Irène was instrumental in establishing the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM) in 1991 as well as the journal of the Society, Musicae Scientiae, in 1997.

I first met Irène in 1988 at the IRCAM conference on Music & the cognitive sciences, organised by Steven McAdams and Carolyn Drake. It was decided that the follow-up meeting would be organised by myself in Cambridge in 1990, and Irène and I subsequently co-edited that conference's proceedings. It was at the Cambridge conference that the foundations for ESCOM were first discussed, the Society itself being established in 1991 with its inaugural conference in Trieste. ESCOM became Irène's major project, together with the establishment of the ESCOM journal Musicae Scientiae in 1997 (which emerged from the ESCOM newsletter of which I followed John Sloboda as editor in 1994 before becoming Associate Editor, English Language, of Musicae Scientiae at its inception).

Irène and I collaborated on research for several years throughout the nineties, with frequent visits to Liège and Brussels enlivened by excellent meals as well as wines from Celestin's remarkable cellar in their house in the Avenue du Brésil off the Avenue Franklin Roosevelt. Irène had a rigorous academic mind but was also a wonderful cook and master organiser, using her extensive networks of contacts to achieve the apparently unachievable. No-one who was there can forget the lavish and meticulously thought-through International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition held at the Université de Liège in 1994 (at which her ostensible boss, Marc Richelle, took me aside and asked, "Ian, can you tell me how does that woman do it?" — to which I really had no reply).

Irène was committed to ensuring that her subject had a pan-European reach. From its outset, coinciding with huge changes in the political environment in Europe, ESCOM was multilingual (reflecting the polyglot nature of Belgian society) and multidisciplinary, and its work did much to develop the scientific —particularly, psychological— study of music and to integrate it into what were then more mainstream approaches to understanding music across the continent. In retrospect, Irène's determination can be seen to have resulted in substantive changes in the landscape of musical academia across Europe (and beyond) that persist to the present day. Irène could be a very demanding colleague but also an enormously generous and warm friend. She devoted a huge amount of her time and her apparently inexhaustible energies to nurturing both the Society and Musicae Scientiae; if we are able to say that both are now on absolutely secure footings, this is largely thanks to the efforts and hard work of Irène Deliège. She will be greatly missed.

Professor Ian Cross