The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Music Culture [research group]
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PROGRAMME FORMAT
Stage I | Articulation and Presentation | November 2026
Stage I consists of two online seminars devoted to the presentation and critical articulation of participants’ practices, current projects, and principal research questions. Each participant or group introduces work in a form appropriate to the project: research papers, performances, recordings, interviews, archives, field notes, scores, films, installations, digital platforms, curatorial proposals, diagrams, or other relevant documentation.
This stage makes the operative questions, categories, and cultural locations of each practice visible without requiring a finished theoretical position. Participants will be invited to identify the concepts on which their work depends, the communities and histories to which it relates, the methods through which it proceeds, and the artistic, intellectual, social, or political stakes it claims. Discussion will attend to the relation between declared aims and practical choices, between analytical language and lived musical experience, and between the internal logic of a project and the wider conditions through which it becomes legible.
Moderated peer response will help participants distinguish productive questions from premature conclusions, clarify terms that remain unstable or contested, and identify lines of inquiry capable of advancing the work. By the end of Stage I, each participant will have established a provisional account of the philosophical grounds of their practice and a focused set of questions for further development.
Stage II | Critical Inquiry and Development | February 2027
Stage II consists of two online seminars examining the grounds, methods, scope, and possible functions of philosophy of music culture. Moving between shared questions and participants’ projects, the group will treat neither music culture nor its philosophy as a self-evident field. It will ask how “music,” “culture,” and their relation are constructed, whose experiences these terms include, and which forms of knowledge can address their plurality.
Inquiry may encompass ontological questions concerning what kinds of entities, practices, events, and relations constitute music culture; epistemological questions concerning who produces knowledge about musical life and by what authority; aesthetic questions concerning taste, judgment, experience, and value; ethical questions concerning representation, appropriation, care, and responsibility; technological questions concerning mediation, access, and agency; institutional questions concerning legitimation, education, preservation, and exclusion; and political questions concerning identity, labour, ownership, public space, and collective memory.
Participants will develop their artistic, musicological, curatorial, and hybrid research projects through sustained discussion and critical reflection. The aim is not to force every practice into a single academic or artistic format, but to strengthen its conceptual precision, methodological coherence, cultural responsiveness, and communicability. Each participant will formulate provisional trajectories for further development, including questions to be tested, concepts to be refined, relations to be reconsidered, and forms of public presentation to be developed before the residency in Bled.
Stage III | Public Presentation and Exchange | June 2027
The programme culminates in research presentations, lectures, artistic contributions, and public discussions at the seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week in Bled, Slovenia. This stage brings the work developed through the online seminars into a wider artistic, scholarly, and public context.
Participants will present the questions, methods, propositions, and outcomes of their research in forms suited to their practices. Public presentation is understood as a further stage of inquiry: an opportunity to test arguments, encounter new responses, refine language, and consider how music-cultural research changes when it enters a shared discursive and performative space.
The Bled residency establishes a concentrated setting for exchange among musicologists, artists, performers, researchers, curators, and audiences. It enables participants to situate their projects in relation to broader debates, develop new intellectual and professional connections, and contribute to the formation of an international discourse on the meanings, conditions, and possibilities of music culture today.
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