The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Music Performance [research group]
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PROGRAMME FORMAT
Stage I | Articulation and Presentation | October 2026
Stage I consists of two online seminars for presenting and critically articulating participants’ practices, projects, and research questions. Participants introduce work through live or recorded performance, rehearsal documentation, annotated scores, interpretive plans, texts, diagrams, technological systems, or other documentation.
This stage does not demand a finished theoretical position; it makes each practice’s operative questions visible. Participants will be invited to identify the concepts on which their work depends, the problems it seeks to address, the methods through which it proceeds, and its artistic and intellectual stakes. Discussion will attend to the relation between stated intentions and performative decisions, between conceptual propositions and embodied procedures, and between a project’s internal logic and wider contexts.
Moderated peer response will help participants distinguish productive questions from premature conclusions, clarify unstable terms, and identify lines of inquiry that advance the work. By Stage I’s end, 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 | January 2026
Stage II consists of two online seminars examining the grounds, methods, scope, and functions of philosophy of music performance. The seminars move between shared questions and specific project demands. Rather than treating philosophy of performance as a pre-existing discipline with fixed boundaries, the group will examine what such a field might need to become, which problems it should address, and which methods are adequate to the realities of contemporary performance practice.
Inquiry may encompass ontological questions concerning the identity of the musical work and performance event; epistemological questions concerning what performers know and how embodied, tacit, practical, and interpretive knowledge is produced; aesthetic questions concerning expression, judgment, experience, and value; ethical questions concerning responsibility, relation, representation, and care; technological questions concerning mediation, reproduction, and agency; institutional questions concerning training, legitimation, access, and authority; and political questions concerning the conditions under which performance is prepared, presented, circulated, and heard.
Participants will develop performances, writing, and artistic-research projects through sustained discussion and critical reflection. The aim is not to force every project into an academic format, but to strengthen its conceptual precision, methodological coherence, artistic force, and communicability. Each participant will formulate provisional trajectories for further artistic and research development, including questions to be tested in rehearsal, concepts to be refined, habits or techniques to be reconsidered, and forms of public presentation to be developed before the residency.
Stage III | Public Presentation and Exchange | June 2027
Participants present their research through lectures and 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 and intellectual context.
The lectures and discussions will articulate the questions, methods, propositions, and outcomes of participants’ research in forms responsive to their practices. The emphasis is not solely on reporting completed results. Public presentation is understood as a further stage of inquiry: an opportunity to test arguments, encounter new responses, refine language, and consider how performance research changes when it enters a shared discursive space.
The Bled residency establishes a concentrated setting for sustained public critical exchange among performers, composers, researchers, 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 conditions and possibilities of music performance 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 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