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This year’s Congress theme of “Sustaining Shared Futures” initially poses a basic challenge to music studies, for music, as sound, is a form of energy whose waves are immaterial and ephemeral. Since sound itself does not last, music is literally unsustainable, and its future is silence. This has been a solved problem for the 150 years that we’ve possessed technologies of sound capture; yet those formats in which we record music’s vanishing traces are imbricated with materialities through and through. What’s more, since the beginning of our history of fixing music’s fugitive energies, those materials have included increasing quantities of oil. Clearly, the bigger sustainability challenge stems precisely from this recognition of music’s resource dependencies: now more than ever before, music culture is petroculture.

Knowing that our lives today are fundamentally shaped by fossil fuels, how do we understand music as multiply implicated in our modern dependencies on a petroleum economy, especially in light of the growing awareness that oil is finite? In the context of climate crisis, what questions do we want to ask about collecting and using music and sustaining the global sonic archive? How do these concerns intersect with the vital energy transitions we increasingly understand as necessary prerequisites to imagining futurity in sustainable terms? Such questions recognize that, while energy transition is about technology, resource, policy and the economics of supply, it is also a human and social issue at the core of our values about collecting, preserving, and sustaining access to the materials of culture.