The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Music History [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 thinkable, communicable, accountable, and historically situated. The following questions establish a shared but non-prescriptive horizon.
The Musical Past and Historical Reality
What is the musical past, and in what sense does it continue to exist? Is it constituted by absent events, surviving objects, embodied practices, memories, or relations reconstructed in the present? How should historians distinguish the past from accounts of it? What claims can be made about sounds, experiences, intentions, and meanings no longer directly available?
Source, Evidence, and Archive
What makes something a historical source, and when does it become evidence? How do manuscripts, recordings, images, instruments, oral testimony, bodily knowledge, and digital traces support different claims? Are archives repositories, systems of classification, institutions of authority, or sites of encounter? How should historians approach damaged, contradictory, inaccessible, or absent records?
Narrative, Causality, and Explanation
How do historical accounts connect events across time? What distinguishes chronology, correlation, influence, causation, and retrospective pattern? Do narratives discover structures or produce coherence through selection and form? How do beginnings, endings, protagonists, turning points, and scale shape meaning? Can writing preserve contingency, simultaneity, and contradiction while remaining intelligible?
Periodisation, Continuity, and Rupture
What does it mean to divide musical time into periods? Whose practices are organised by categories such as medieval, modern, avant-garde, postwar, or contemporary, and whose are displaced? How do continuity, revival, revolution, and rupture depend on selected evidence and geography? Which temporal models can describe overlap, recurrence, latency, and multiple coexisting histories?
Work, Performance, and Mediation
What is the historical identity of a musical work? Does it reside in an originating act, authorised text, performances, recording, interpretive tradition, or changing network of mediations? How do notation, instruments, venues, bodies, technologies, and listening conventions transform what persists? What happens when historians address practices not organised around stable works?
Biography, Agency, and Collective Life
How should historical agency be understood? What changes when history is narrated through composers, performers, patrons, institutions, communities, technologies, or movements? How do biography and intention interact with structures exceeding individual control? Can historians recognise distributed and nonhuman agency without dissolving responsibility, or describe communities without making them homogeneous actors?
Canon, Exclusion, and Recovery
How are canons produced, maintained, revised, and refused? Which mechanisms make certain works, people, places, and narratives representative while rendering others peripheral? What does it mean to recover a neglected practice, and into which framework is it recovered? Can inclusion transform the structures producing exclusion, or are different historical forms required?
Listening, Interpretation, and Anachronism
Can historians hear the past, or only present sounds under historically informed conditions? How do contemporary bodies, concepts, technologies, and expectations shape historical listening? When is anachronism an error, and when might it become a critical method? How should historians negotiate between actors’ categories and present vocabularies when inherited terms are inadequate or harmful?
Memory, Testimony, and Historical Responsibility
How do personal and collective memory, oral history, commemoration, and forgetting relate to evidence? What truths can testimony convey beyond factual verification? How should historians approach trauma, secrecy, contested recollection, or vulnerable participants? What responsibilities arise when research reopens conflict, circulates private material, names individuals, or converts lived experience into public knowledge?
Institution, Power, and the Politics of History
How do universities, archives, publishers, festivals, museums, ensembles, broadcasters, funders, and platforms shape music history? Which geographical, linguistic, disciplinary, and economic hierarchies determine access and legitimacy? How are narratives entangled with nationalism, colonialism, race, gender, class, religion, disability, and other structures of power? What institutional changes might responsible historiography require?
Technology, Preservation, and Digital Historiography
How do recording, digitisation, databases, metadata, mapping, computational analysis, search systems, and artificial intelligence alter historical knowledge? Which patterns become visible at scale, and which contexts disappear? Who determines standards, categories, and access? How should historians address obsolete formats, platform dependency, algorithmic bias, environmental cost, and the fragility of apparently permanent digital materials?
Concepts Yet to Be Named
How might music-historical practice generate concepts for temporalities, relations, absences, and evidence that existing vocabularies cannot name? Which new distinctions are required, and which inherited distinctions should be retained, revised, or refused? How can concepts remain precise enough to guide inquiry without becoming restrictive categories or universal claims?
These questions prescribe neither a closed theoretical agenda, unified methodology, nor authoritative philosophy of music history. They establish a plural field within which participants may formulate problems specific to their materials, test concepts against evidence, challenge inherited narratives, and develop positions responsive to the demands and consequences of their work.
DATES
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PROGRAMME FORMAT
RESEARCH PREMISE
WHY THE NEW LEXICON?
CENTRAL QUESTIONS
WORKING METHOD
PARTICIPANT VALUE
WHO THE PROGRAMME ADDRESSES
TOWARDS MULTIPLE PHILOSOPHIES OF MUSIC HISTORY
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