The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Music Culture [research group]
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CENTRAL QUESTIONS
Participants are invited to interrogate the concepts that structure their artistic and musicological practices and to develop vocabularies through which those practices may become more precisely thinkable, communicable, and historically situated. The following questions establish a shared but non-prescriptive horizon of inquiry.
Music, Culture, and Meaning
What do we mean when we speak of music as culture or of a music culture? Is culture a context, a practice, a system of symbols, a form of life, a field of power, or a relation continually produced through participation? How does sound become socially meaningful, and how do musical meanings change as practices move among places, media, institutions, and publics? Can music be separated from the cultural processes through which it is named and heard?
Practice, Participation, and Everyday Life
How is music embedded in rituals, routines, celebrations, protest, worship, work, leisure, education, care, and social gathering? Who is permitted to participate, under what terms, and with what consequences? What distinctions are created between artist and audience, expert and amateur, producer and consumer, insider and outsider? How might listening, dancing, collecting, sharing, remembering, and discussing music be understood as forms of cultural agency?
Identity, Difference, and Belonging
How do musical practices contribute to the formation of personal and collective identities? When does music sustain belonging, and when does it police boundaries? How are race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality, class, disability, age, religion, and migration heard, represented, or made invisible? How can research and artistic work attend to difference without treating identity as fixed, homogeneous, or available for unrestricted use?
Tradition, Heritage, and Cultural Memory
How are traditions created, transmitted, revised, and authorized? Who decides what should be preserved as heritage, and what forms of change are accepted as continuity or condemned as loss? What is the relation between living practice and institutional preservation? How do archives, monuments, recordings, repertoires, testimony, and embodied memory produce different accounts of the past? Which absences and silences shape what a culture remembers?
Genre, Canon, and Classification
How do genres and canons organize knowledge, taste, education, funding, and visibility? Do classifications describe existing differences or help produce them? Which practices become exemplary, peripheral, hybrid, traditional, popular, experimental, or unclassifiable, and according to whose criteria? How might inherited categories be used critically without reproducing the hierarchies embedded within them?
Media, Technology, and Circulation
How do recording, broadcasting, notation, social media, streaming, algorithms, archives, and artificial intelligence mediate musical culture? Do technologies merely transmit music, or do they shape what can be created, valued, discovered, remembered, and monetized? How are attention, data, and visibility distributed? What new cultural forms emerge through networked circulation, and what dependencies, exclusions, or forms of extraction accompany them?
Institutions, Publics, and Authority
How do conservatoires, universities, museums, festivals, venues, publishers, broadcasters, platforms, critics, and funding bodies define legitimate musical knowledge and practice? How are publics assembled, imagined, measured, and addressed? Who is authorized to speak for a tradition, interpret a community, curate a history, or represent cultural value? What alternatives emerge through informal, grassroots, diasporic, independent, or self-organized infrastructures?
Labour, Economy, and Ownership
Whose labour makes musical culture possible, and which forms of labour remain unseen or unpaid? How do copyright, contracts, cultural policy, patronage, markets, platforms, and informal exchange shape artistic autonomy and collective access? What is owned when music is recorded, sampled, archived, inherited, or shared? How should questions of appropriation, compensation, attribution, consent, and benefit be understood across unequal cultural and economic relations?
Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics
Can aesthetic judgment be separated from cultural history and social position? How do ideas of beauty, excellence, innovation, authenticity, complexity, relevance, and success acquire authority? What ethical responsibilities arise when artists and researchers work with communities, archives, identities, or traumatic histories? How can music create solidarity, dissent, repair, or public imagination, and when might claims for music’s political power obscure its limits or consequences?
Concepts Yet to Be Named
What phenomena within contemporary musical life cannot be adequately described by existing artistic, musicological, or philosophical vocabularies? Which distinctions are demanded by changing forms of participation, mediation, mobility, ecology, and cultural relation? What inherited concepts should be retained, revised, translated, multiplied, or refused? How can new terms remain precise enough to be useful without becoming restrictive classifications?
These questions do not prescribe a closed theoretical agenda, a unified methodology, or an authoritative philosophy of music culture. They establish a common yet deliberately plural field within which participants may formulate problems specific to their practices, test concepts against situated experience, challenge inherited assumptions, and develop positions responsive to the people, materials, histories, and conditions with which they work.
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 CULTURE
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