The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Musical Arts [research group]
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WHY THE NEW LEXICON?
The title The New Lexicon names the need to reconsider the languages through which musical practices describe, interpret, organize, and evaluate themselves. Terms such as music, work, score, performance, interpretation, form, material, sound, authorship, originality, autonomy, expression, virtuosity, authenticity, participation, experimentation, and artistic value remain central to musical discourse. Their meanings, however, cannot be assumed to be stable, self-evident, or universally adequate.
These terms carry histories formed within particular aesthetic traditions, institutions, technologies, pedagogies, economies, and relations of authority. They enable some distinctions and obscure others. They may illuminate one practice while misrepresenting another. Collaborative models, new technologies, ecological conditions, changing modes of circulation, and emerging forms of listening continually test their explanatory power. Practices organized around distributed authorship, improvisation, adaptive systems, site-responsiveness, participation, artificial intelligence, archival intervention, or unstable media may require existing concepts to be revised, differentiated, or supplemented.
A new lexicon does not mean replacing one vocabulary with another definitive system. The programme does not seek novelty for its own sake, nor assume that inherited concepts are simply obsolete. It asks what existing words permit us to perceive, what assumptions they carry, where they generate confusion or exclusion, and where new distinctions become necessary. To name a process differently is potentially to hear, perform, organize, and value it differently.
The programme therefore treats vocabulary as a site of collective research. Participants will identify key terms within their practices, trace their assumptions, compare their uses across contexts, and formulate alternatives where necessary. The objective is not universal agreement, but greater conceptual precision alongside artistic plurality. A productive lexicon should make disagreement more intelligible, not eliminate it. It emerges through movement between making and naming, sensation and articulation, artistic proposition and critical response.
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