The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Music Performance [research group]
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RESEARCH PREMISE
The New Lexicon proceeds from the premise that performance practice is never philosophically neutral. Decisions concerning timing, articulation, sound, gesture, technique, notation, memory, technology, and collaboration do more than shape presentation. Whether explicitly articulated or tacitly operative, such decisions entail commitments concerning the identity of the work, the authority of the score, the status of intention, the nature of expression, the distribution of agency, the role of the body, the temporality of the event, and the conditions under which music becomes intelligible.
A performer may, for example, treat the score as an authoritative prescription, a field of possibilities, a historical document, a collaborative proposition, or one element within a broader network of bodies, instruments, spaces, technologies, and listeners. Performance may seek fidelity to a text, authorial intention, historical style, the work’s perceived demands, the performer’s experience, or the event’s singular conditions. Each orientation carries philosophical consequences, even when those consequences remain unstated.
The residency therefore approaches performance as an intellectual, artistic, embodied, and social practice in which concepts of interpretation, fidelity, freedom, authorship, agency, technique, expression, presence, liveness, listening, and value are actively produced, negotiated, and contested. Philosophy is neither an external framework imposed on practice nor retrospective commentary after the event. It is approached as immanent to performance: as a means of rendering assumptions legible, clarifying the concepts enacted through artistic decisions, and examining the historical, institutional, technological, material, and political conditions through which those decisions acquire meaning and consequence.
This does not require performances to illustrate philosophical theses or performative knowledge to become academic argument. On the contrary, the programme asks what forms of thought become possible through rehearsal, interpretation, embodiment, and performance themselves. Shaping duration, sound, gesture, breath, attention, relation, risk, and presence may disclose understandings not fully anticipated in propositional language. A phrasing decision may embody a theory of musical time; an ensemble rehearsal may test a model of collective agency; an improvisation may expose the relation between freedom and constraint; a technologically mediated performance may redistribute intention and responsibility; an encounter with an audience may reveal how meaning is co-produced in real time.
Performance knowledge is often tacit, situated, and embodied. It may reside in perception, memory, breath, touch, timing, responsiveness, and action under changing conditions. Such knowledge is neither reducible to verbal explanation nor inaccessible to critical inquiry. The programme examines how practical knowledge can become shareable without detachment from the bodies, histories, instruments, and situations through which it exists. It asks how performers know, how training forms and transmits knowledge, and how inherited techniques enable or limit artistic possibility.
The programme accordingly investigates a reciprocal relation. It asks not only how philosophy may interpret performance, but also how performance may operate as a distinctive form of conceptual, speculative, and critical inquiry. Performance is considered simultaneously as an object of philosophical examination and as a practice capable of producing philosophical insight. The central question is therefore not simply, “What does this performance express?” It is also: “What does this practice make perceptible and thinkable, and by what means?”
Such inquiry requires attention to both internal and external conditions. The internal organization of a performance—its timing, sound, gesture, technique, interaction, spatial logic, and modes of attention—cannot be separated from the infrastructures and institutions that enable it. Performative possibilities are shaped by instruments, bodies, acoustics, recording and streaming technologies, educational systems, rehearsal economies, labor conditions, funding structures, programming conventions, disciplinary categories, and inherited narratives of excellence. To examine the philosophy of performance is therefore also to ask how these conditions authorize certain practices, marginalize others, and influence what can be recognized as expertise, interpretation, virtuosity, or performance in the first place.
The New Lexicon treats this expanded field not as a reason to dissolve the specificity of performance, but as a means of describing that specificity more adequately. Performance remains a situated practice of making decisions in time, embodying relations, organizing attention, and negotiating the unpredictable. Yet its identity cannot be secured by a single repertoire, technique, institution, or historical definition. The field must be capable of addressing notated and improvised music, acoustic and electronic practices, solo and collective work, concert performance and installation, human and computational agency, live presence and technological mediation. Philosophy of music performance becomes necessary precisely where inherited definitions cease to account for the plurality of contemporary practice.
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