The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Music Culture [research group]
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RESEARCH PREMISE
The New Lexicon proceeds from the premise that music culture is neither a neutral background surrounding musical works nor a stable collection of customs, repertories, and communities. It is an active and contested field of practices through which sounds acquire meaning, people recognize or refuse forms of belonging, institutions establish authority, technologies organize access, and histories are preserved, revised, forgotten, or suppressed. Music does not simply reflect culture. It participates in making culture by shaping perception, memory, conduct, identity, relation, and public imagination.
Every musical practice is situated within conditions that exceed the sounding event. Decisions concerning what is performed, recorded, taught, funded, archived, programmed, published, categorized, or heard entail judgments about value and legitimacy. An archive may preserve vulnerable histories while reproducing the authority of its selectors; a festival may create a public while defining what can appear as contemporary or representative; a digital platform may expand circulation while making attention measurable and economically managed.
The residency therefore approaches music culture as a network of relations among practices, bodies, institutions, media, environments, economies, and narratives. Concepts such as tradition, community, authenticity, heritage, scene, canon, genre, participation, identity, innovation, and access are not treated as transparent descriptions. They are understood as active terms that organize perception and distribute authority. They can enable recognition, continuity, and collective agency, but they can also naturalize exclusions, conceal labour, stabilize unequal relations, or reduce complex practices to marketable identities.
Philosophy is understood neither as an external system imposed upon musical life nor as abstract commentary detached from its material conditions. It is approached as a practice of conceptual and normative inquiry: a means of asking what our categories presuppose, how our judgments are justified, which experiences they render visible, and what consequences follow from their use. Philosophy of music culture investigates not only what musical practices mean, but how meaning is produced, by whom, under which conditions, and with what claims upon others.
Musicological research can reveal the historical formation and situated operation of concepts that philosophy might otherwise treat as universal. Artistic practice can stage relations, contradictions, and forms of knowledge that exceed explanatory prose. Performance can reorganize a public; listening can attend to difference; an installation can expose infrastructures of circulation; archival work can alter how history is inherited; and collaboration can test authorship, consent, reciprocity, and care. These activities generate and revise concepts rather than merely illustrating philosophical positions.
The programme consequently asks not only, “What does this music express about a culture?” It also asks: “How does this musical practice produce cultural relations? What forms of life does it sustain, imagine, regulate, or contest? What does it permit participants to know, feel, remember, and do?” These questions shift attention from music as a bounded object toward the processes through which musical meaning, value, and participation are organized.
Such inquiry requires attention to cultural specificity without reducing practices to fixed identities. Music is situated, but situations are internally diverse and historically changing. Communities are not homogeneous; traditions are not motionless; identities are neither merely chosen nor mechanically determined. The same practice may carry different meanings across places, generations, media, and relations of power. The programme therefore resists both universal accounts that erase difference and reductive accounts that confine people or practices to predetermined cultural categories.
It also requires attention to the infrastructures through which music becomes available. Education, venues, cultural policy, funding, archives, copyright, recording, streaming, journalism, and informal networks shape what can be made, heard, remembered, and recognized. They distribute resources and visibility while influencing how music is evaluated. A philosophy of music culture must therefore examine symbolic meaning alongside labour, ownership, access, environmental cost, and institutional power.
The New Lexicon treats this expanded field not as a reason to dissolve musical specificity, but as a means of describing it more adequately. Sound, rhythm, duration, embodiment, performance, and listening remain central, yet their significance cannot be secured by a single account of the work, listener, community, or social world. Philosophy of music culture becomes necessary where inherited definitions cease to account for plural practices and changing conditions of meaning.
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