The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Music History [research group]
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WORKING METHOD
The residency is organised around sustained exchange rather than one-directional instruction. Participants bring projects already situated within particular archives, historiographical traditions, musical cultures, methods, and questions. The task of the group is to create conditions under which those projects can be examined with rigour, generosity, ethical attentiveness, and conceptual precision.
Presentation and discussion may engage manuscripts, editions, recordings, interviews, field notes, artefacts, catalogues, datasets, maps, exhibitions, essays, lectures, websites, podcasts, performances, or hybrid forms. No single medium is treated as the default form of historical evidence or argument. Materials are considered according to the questions they raise, the claims they can support, the absences they disclose, and the forms of understanding they make possible.
Participants will define terms, identify assumptions guiding the selection and interpretation of evidence, clarify relations between sources and claims, and distinguish historical questions from the methods used to pursue them. Discussion will consider not only what a project establishes, but how its premises are embodied in its archive, scale, chronology, narrative, citations, presentation, and reception.
Criticality is understood as a constructive practice. Feedback should not merely affirm a project or measure it against a single disciplinary norm. It should help reveal the consequences of its choices, identify tensions between evidence and explanation, locate unexamined exclusions, and open viable paths for development. Participants will be asked to respond to others with the same seriousness they expect for their own work.
The inquiry is intentionally plural. Its purpose is not to establish historiographical consensus, prescribe adherence to a particular philosophy of history, or subordinate archival research to theoretical explanation. Productive disagreement, methodological difference, and conceptual tension are necessary conditions of collective research. The programme seeks a discourse in which incompatible positions can be stated clearly, examined fairly, and developed through encounter.
DATES
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