The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Musical Arts [research group]
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RESEARCH PREMISE
The New Lexicon proceeds from the premise that musical practice is never philosophically neutral. Decisions concerning what may count as music or musical art, how sound and silence are organized, where agency is located, how bodies and technologies mediate experience, what relations obtain among makers, performers, listeners, spaces, and institutions, and how value is established do more than shape a project’s appearance. Explicitly articulated or tacitly operative, such decisions entail commitments concerning ontology, knowledge, subjectivity, temporality, embodiment, sociality, responsibility, and the conditions under which musical experience becomes intelligible.
A practice may treat the score as the primary site of a work, regard performance as its decisive realization, or understand both as elements within a wider network of bodies, actions, technologies, memories, and situations. It may locate authorship in an individual maker, distribute agency among collaborators, audiences, instruments, algorithms, or environments, or question whether authorship adequately describes the activity at all. It may understand musical material as discovered, inherited, constructed, technologically produced, socially negotiated, or ecologically entangled. Each orientation carries philosophical consequences, even when they remain unstated.
The roles through which musical art is produced are equally open to examination. Composers, performers, improvisers, sound artists, producers, curators, instrument builders, technologists, educators, and listeners enter artistic processes differently, yet inherited disciplinary divisions can obscure how making, interpreting, framing, transmitting, and receiving are mutually constitutive. The programme asks how these roles are formed, where their boundaries remain useful, and where they prevent more adequate accounts of artistic agency.
The residency approaches the musical arts as intellectual, sensory, embodied, technical, and social practices in which concepts of work, event, sound, form, material, expression, interpretation, authorship, agency, technology, temporality, participation, performance, and listening are actively produced, negotiated, and contested. Philosophy is understood neither as an external framework imposed upon practice nor as commentary added after completion. It is approached as immanent to artistic activity: a means of making assumptions legible, clarifying concepts enacted through decisions, and examining the conditions through which those decisions acquire meaning and consequence.
This does not imply that every project must illustrate a philosophical thesis, or that musical knowledge must become conventional academic argument before it can be taken seriously. The programme instead asks what forms of thought become possible through artistic processes themselves. The organization of sound, duration, gesture, notation, space, technology, embodiment, attention, and encounter may disclose relations that propositional language cannot anticipate. A score may model agency; improvisation may test freedom and constraint; performance may make responsibility perceptible; an installation may reorganize sound, place, and attention; curation may produce a claim about history; technology may redistribute intention; listening may transform what can be recognized as musical.
The programme therefore asks not only how philosophy may interpret or evaluate the musical arts, but also how musical practices may operate as conceptual, speculative, experiential, and critical inquiry. Musical art is considered both an object of philosophical examination and a practice capable of producing philosophical insight. The central question is not simply, “What does this work, event, or practice mean?” It is also: “What does it make thinkable, perceptible, or shareable, and by what means?”
Such inquiry requires attention to internal and external conditions. A project’s materials, procedures, forms, temporal logic, interactions, and structures of attention cannot be separated from the infrastructures and institutions that enable them. Artistic possibilities are shaped by instruments, technologies, education, funding, venues, archives, publishing and recording conventions, performance economies, disciplinary categories, curatorial decisions, and inherited narratives of excellence. To examine philosophy of musical arts is also to ask how these conditions authorize certain practices, marginalize others, distribute labour and visibility, and influence what is recognized as musical art.
The New Lexicon treats this expanded field not as a reason to dissolve the specificity of musical practice, but as a means of describing it more adequately. The musical arts remain situated practices of making decisions, constructing relations, organizing attention, and proposing forms of experience. Yet their identity cannot be secured by one medium, technique, institution, canon, or definition of music. The field must address scores and sounds, bodies and environments, performances and recordings, algorithms and instruments, individual authorship and collective process, aesthetic autonomy and social implication. Philosophy of musical arts becomes necessary where inherited definitions no longer account for the plurality of contemporary practice.
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