The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Musical Arts [research group]
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CENTRAL QUESTIONS
Participants are invited to interrogate the presuppositions structuring their practices and develop concepts, methods, and vocabularies through which those practices may become more precisely thinkable, communicable, and historically situated. The following questions establish a shared but non-prescriptive horizon of inquiry.
Musical Art and Its Boundaries
What makes a practice musical, and what makes it art? Are the musical arts defined by sound, intention, convention, experience, technique, institution, or relation? What happens when a project includes movement, image, language, architecture, code, social organization, or environmental process? Where do distinctions among music, sound art, performance art, theatre, media art, research, ritual, and everyday activity clarify practice, and where do they restrict it? Who draws these boundaries, and with what consequences?
Making, Performing, Curating, and Listening
How are making, performing, improvising, interpreting, curating, and listening related? Are they distinct activities, successive stages, overlapping modes of agency, or historically produced roles? Can listening itself be an artistic practice? Can curation compose relations among works, spaces, histories, and publics? How does performance generate knowledge not contained in a score or plan? What is created by a listener, and how does that creation affect the event?
Work, Event, Practice, and Identity
What is the ontological status of a musical artwork? Where might its identity reside: in a score, recording, sounding event, performing body, technological apparatus, protocol, listening situation, documentation, memory, or relations among them? How much variation can a work sustain while remaining the same work? What happens when musical art produces processes, environments, encounters, archives, or situations rather than stable objects? Is continuity secured by material, intention, attribution, convention, or repeated recognition?
Sound, Form, Material, and Time
How are sound, form, material, and time constituted within different practices? To what extent are they discovered, constructed, inherited, negotiated, or retrospectively attributed? Can sound be separated from the bodies, technologies, spaces, histories, and economies through which it becomes available? Is form an internal organization, a mode of perception, a social convention, a temporal negotiation, or an interaction among these dimensions? How do repetition, anticipation, memory, interruption, and latency alter what musical art can organize?
Authorship, Agency, Interpretation, and Responsibility
How are authorship, intentionality, interpretation, responsibility, and agency distributed among composers, performers, improvisers, producers, curators, listeners, instruments, environments, institutions, and technologies? What does authorship mean when outcomes depend on collective decision, inherited material, chance, automation, or nonhuman processes? Is interpretation a realization of prior meaning, an act of co-creation, or a negotiation with constraints? How should responsibility be understood when agency is distributed but consequences remain real?
Body, Skill, Technology, and Presence
What bodies, abilities, disciplines, vulnerabilities, and forms of attention does a practice presuppose? How are skill and virtuosity defined, and whose labour becomes audible or visible? What meanings attach to presence, liveness, effort, risk, spontaneity, precision, and control? How do fatigue, memory, disability, gesture, breath, and social identity shape experience? How do instruments, software, interfaces, networks, algorithms, and artificial intelligence participate in producing what can be imagined, performed, and heard?
Knowledge, Experience, Judgment, and Value
What forms of knowledge can the musical arts produce? How might such knowledge be embodied, tacit, affective, relational, procedural, speculative, or propositional? How can it be articulated and shared without being reduced to verbal claims? By what criteria are artistic decisions judged, and who establishes those criteria? How are coherence, beauty, originality, innovation, expression, authenticity, relevance, accessibility, and success historically and institutionally formed? Whose experience is treated as evidence?
Institution, History, Ecology, and Politics
How do disciplinary conventions, educational models, archives, venues, festivals, funding systems, media platforms, publishing practices, and curatorial structures enable or delimit the musical arts? Which histories are treated as central, and which practices remain unrecognized? How are aesthetic values entangled with labour, class, race, gender, disability, geography, and political circumstance? What material and ecological costs support musical production and circulation? What responsibilities arise when artists engage communities, environments, archives, technologies, or contested representation?
Concepts Yet to Be Named
How might musical practice generate concepts for phenomena that existing artistic and philosophical vocabularies cannot adequately name? What distinctions are required by contemporary practices, and which inherited distinctions should be retained, revised, or refused? How can new concepts remain precise enough to be useful without becoming restrictive categories? How might a concept emerge through sound, action, relation, or experience before it becomes a word?
These questions do not prescribe a closed theoretical agenda, unified methodology, or authoritative philosophy of musical arts. They establish a common yet deliberately plural field within which participants may formulate problems specific to their practices, test concepts against artistic processes, challenge inherited assumptions, and develop positions responsive to the demands of their work.
DATES
MENTORS
PROGRAMME FORMAT
RESEARCH PREMISE
WHY THE NEW LEXICON?
CENTRAL QUESTIONS
WORKING METHOD
PARTICIPANT VALUE
WHO THE PROGRAMME ADDRESSES
TOWARDS MULTIPLE PHILOSOPHIES OF MUSICAL ARTS
APPLICATION
APPLICATION FORM AND
PARTICIPATION FEES
The New Lexicon program is produced by .abeceda Institute
.abeceda [Institute for Research in Art, Critical Thought and Philosophy], a public-benefit NGO and non-profit organisation dedicated to advancing contemporary artistic practices and critical inquiry. Through its innovative programmes, .abeceda has gained international recognition as one of the leading platforms for contemporary music and artistic research in the Adriatic region and across Europe: www.abeceda.io