The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Music Performance [research group]
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CENTRAL QUESTIONS
Participants are invited to interrogate their practices and develop concepts, methods, and vocabularies through which their work becomes more precisely thinkable, communicable, and historically situated. The following questions establish a shared, non-prescriptive horizon.
Performance and the Musical Idea
What constitutes a performative idea? Is it a prior intention, an interpretive principle, a bodily solution, a relation discovered in sound, an interaction among performers, or an account constructed after the event? Through which conceptual, embodied, social, and technological processes does an idea become gesture, sound, action, or experience? What is gained or lost as it moves among these forms?
Work, Score, Event, and Identity
What is the relation between a musical work and its performances? Where might the identity of a performance reside: in the realization of a score, the continuity of an interpretive approach, the singularity of a sounding event, the actions of performers, the technological apparatus, the listening situation, the documentation, or the relations among them? How much variation can an interpretation sustain? What happens when performance produces processes, environments, protocols, or situations rather than realizations of stable works?
Interpretation, Fidelity, and Freedom
What does it mean to interpret music? To what or whom might performance be faithful: a text, a composer, a tradition, a historical practice, a work-concept, a community, an audience, or the conditions of the present event? When does fidelity become obedience, and when does freedom become arbitrariness? How do notation, convention, expertise, memory, and expectation shape interpretive possibility?
Embodiment, Technique, and Gesture
Which bodies, capacities, vulnerabilities, and histories does performance presuppose? Is technique a neutral means, a cultivated form of knowledge, an inherited discipline, a social norm, or a way of organizing perception and possibility? How do breath, touch, posture, fatigue, pain, pleasure, disability, gender, age, and cultural inscription participate in musical meaning? When does gesture communicate, produce sound, organize relation, or become the object of attention itself?
Authorship, Agency, and Responsibility
How are authorship, intentionality, responsibility, and agency distributed among performers, composers, listeners, conductors, instruments, environments, institutions, scores, and technologies? What does claiming an interpretation mean when outcomes depend on collective decision, improvisation, chance, automation, or nonhuman processes? How should responsibility be understood when agency is distributed but artistic, ethical, and social consequences remain real?
Liveness, Technology, and Mediation
What makes a performance live? Is liveness physical co-presence, simultaneity, risk, responsiveness, irreversibility, or a cultural expectation? How do microphones, recordings, editing, amplification, streaming, interfaces, software, and computational systems mediate performance? Do technologies transmit actions already formed, or do they participate in producing what can be played, heard, remembered, and valued?
Listening, Audience, and Relation
Which concepts of listening shape performance decisions? Is the listener imagined as observer, participant, analyst, consumer, witness, collaborator, or co-producer of musical meaning? How do performers listen to themselves, to one another, to a score, to a space, and to an audience? How do attention, memory, atmosphere, acoustics, social codes, and collective expectation shape what a performance can become?
Knowledge, Judgment, and Value
What forms of knowledge can performance produce? How might embodied, tacit, practical, and relational knowledge be articulated, evaluated, transmitted, or shared without reduction to propositions? By which criteria are performances judged, and who establishes them? How are concepts such as accuracy, expressivity, authenticity, coherence, originality, virtuosity, risk, relevance, and success historically and institutionally formed?
Institution, Labor, History, and Politics
How do disciplinary conventions, pedagogical models, audition systems, rehearsal structures, material infrastructures, funding mechanisms, programming practices, and performance institutions enable, govern, or delimit what performers can do? Which repertoires, techniques, bodies, and histories are treated as normative, and which remain unrecognized? How are aesthetic values entangled with labor, access, hierarchy, representation, and political circumstance? What responsibilities arise when performance engages communities, archives, technologies, environments, or contested cultural materials?
Concepts Yet to Be Named
How might performance practice generate concepts for phenomena that existing musical and philosophical vocabularies cannot adequately name? What new distinctions are required by contemporary practices, and what inherited distinctions should be retained, revised, or refused? How can new concepts remain precise enough to be useful without becoming restrictive categories?
These questions do not prescribe a closed theoretical agenda, a unified methodology, or an authoritative philosophy of performance. They establish a common yet deliberately plural field of investigation within which participants may formulate problems specific to their practices, test concepts against rehearsal and performance, challenge inherited assumptions, and develop positions responsive to the particular demands of their 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 COMPOSITION
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