The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Music History [research group]
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RESEARCH PREMISE
The New Lexicon proceeds from the premise that music history is never philosophically neutral. Decisions about what counts as evidence, where a history begins and ends, how time is divided, which events are connected, whose actions matter, how absence is interpreted, and how significance is established do more than organise information. Explicitly or tacitly, they entail commitments concerning reality, knowledge, causality, temporality, subjectivity, value, responsibility, and the conditions under which the past becomes intelligible.
A historical practice may treat the musical work as a stable object, or as a changing constellation of scores, performances, technologies, institutions, and reception. It may locate agency in composers, distribute it across performers, patrons, publishers, technicians, communities, and infrastructures, or question whether authorship adequately describes historical change. It may understand an archive as a repository of facts, a politically formed structure, a technology of memory, or a field shaped as much by destruction and neglect as by preservation. Each orientation carries philosophical consequences, even when they remain unstated.
The residency approaches music history as an intellectual, interpretive, and social practice in which concepts of past, event, work, context, source, evidence, agency, continuity, rupture, tradition, influence, canon, memory, and value are actively produced and contested. Philosophy is neither an external framework imposed upon materials nor commentary added after research. It is immanent to historiographical activity: a means of rendering assumptions legible, clarifying concepts enacted through historical decisions, and examining the material, institutional, technological, and political conditions through which those decisions acquire authority.
This does not imply that historical research must illustrate a philosophical thesis or translate archival knowledge into abstract argument. The programme asks what forms of thought become possible through historical procedures themselves. Juxtaposed sources may disclose a relation no document states. A critical edition may expose the instability of a work’s identity. Oral history may reveal temporalities unavailable to institutional archives. A map or database may change the scale at which influence becomes visible. A reconstructed performance may test assumptions about sound, embodiment, and historical possibility.
The programme investigates a reciprocal relation. It asks not only how philosophy may interpret music history, but how historical research may operate as conceptual, speculative, and critical inquiry. Music history is both an object of philosophical examination and a practice capable of philosophical insight. The central question is therefore not simply, “What happened?” It is also: “How does this account make a past thinkable, by what means, and with what consequences?”
Such inquiry requires attention to historical arguments and the conditions enabling them. Sources, narratives, periodisations, comparisons, and scales cannot be separated from archives, catalogues, libraries, recording formats, copyright, educational systems, funding, publishing, curatorial decisions, search technologies, and inherited values. These conditions shape what survives, what becomes accessible, which questions appear legitimate, and who is authorised to answer them.
The surviving record is neither equivalent to the past nor evenly distributed across it. Preservation follows power, resources, accident, desire, and institutional priority. Some practices leave scores, recordings, correspondence, and reviews; others persist through bodies, memory, oral transmission, informal circulation, or traces not recognised as evidence. Responsible history must therefore ask not only what sources disclose, but why they exist, which lives remain undocumented, and how historians should speak when absence cannot be repaired.
Historical narration also intervenes in the present. Period labels, genealogies, canons, biographies, and accounts of innovation influence teaching, programming, funding, criticism, identity, and cultural memory. A history may legitimise institutions, naturalise exclusions, construct communities, or support resistance and recovery. Historiography therefore distributes visibility and significance, authorises continuities, and shapes the futures for which particular pasts can be mobilised.
The New Lexicon treats this expanded field not as a reason to dissolve music history’s specificity, but as a means of describing it more adequately. Music history remains a situated practice of investigating traces, constructing relations, evaluating claims, and composing accounts of change. Yet its identity cannot be secured by one archive, method, geography, musical category, or model of time. Philosophy of music history becomes necessary where inherited definitions cease to account for the plurality, incompleteness, and consequence of historical practice.
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MENTORS
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