The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Music Performance [research group]
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WHY THE NEW LEXICON?
The title The New Lexicon names the need to reconsider the conceptual languages through which performance practice describes, interprets, and evaluates itself. Established terms such as interpretation, fidelity, authenticity, expression, technique, virtuosity, presence, liveness, freedom, and musical value remain central to performance discourse. Yet their meanings cannot be assumed to be stable, self-evident, or universally adequate.
These terms carry histories. They emerged within particular aesthetic traditions, pedagogies, institutions, technologies, and relations of authority. They enable certain distinctions and obscure others. They may illuminate one practice while misrepresenting another. New approaches to repertoire, improvisation, embodiment, technology, participation, and audience relations test their explanatory power. Distributed agency, networked performance, adaptive systems, expanded instruments, accessibility, artificial intelligence, and unstable media may require concepts to be revised or supplemented.
A new lexicon, however, does not mean the replacement of one vocabulary by another definitive system. The programme seeks neither terminological novelty nor the wholesale rejection of inherited concepts. Its task is more exacting: to examine what existing words permit us to perceive, what assumptions they carry, where they generate confusion, and where new distinctions become necessary.
Lexical work is inseparable from performative work. To name a relation differently is potentially to hear, rehearse, embody, and value it differently. To distinguish interpretation from execution, fidelity from obedience, technique from habit, expression from display, presence from proximity, or collaboration from participation is not merely to refine discourse after the fact. Such distinctions can alter practical decisions. Conversely, performance may expose phenomena for which no adequate term yet exists. The new lexicon emerges between doing and naming, sensation and articulation, proposition and response.
The programme therefore treats vocabulary as a site of collective research. Participants will be encouraged to identify key terms within their own practices, trace the assumptions attached to them, compare their uses across different contexts, and formulate alternatives where necessary. The objective is not universal agreement. It is to increase conceptual precision while preserving the plurality of artistic positions. A productive lexicon should make disagreement more intelligible, not eliminate it.
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