The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Musical Ideas [research group]
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CENTRAL QUESTIONS
Participants are invited to interrogate the presuppositions that structure their musical and scholarly practices and to develop concepts, methods, and vocabularies through which musical ideas may become more precisely thinkable, communicable, and historically situated. The following questions establish a shared but non-prescriptive horizon of inquiry.
What Is a Musical Idea?
Is a musical idea a mental content, a perceptible pattern, a rule, a gesture, a formal relation, an expressive character, or an activity? Must it be identifiable before it can guide practice? Can an idea exist without a work, notation, performance, or listener? What distinguishes a musical idea from an idea about music, and can that distinction remain stable?
Invention, Discovery, and Emergence
Are musical ideas invented, discovered, remembered, received, or generated through interaction? What roles do experimentation, accident, constraint, imitation, intuition, and repetition play? How do materials, instruments, collaborators, environments, and technologies participate in thought? At what point can an emerging possibility be called an idea?
Idea, Material, and Form
What relation obtains among an idea, the materials through which it appears, and the form it acquires? Can the same idea survive radical changes of sound, duration, instrumentation, or structure? Does development reveal what an idea already contains, or create something that retrospectively changes its identity? When does variation become another idea?
Notation, Language, and Representation
Does notation represent an idea already formed, or help to produce it? What can words, scores, diagrams, recordings, demonstrations, and code make precise, and what do they leave indeterminate? How does an idea change as it moves from one representational form to another? Can a musical idea be translated without remainder?
Performance, Embodiment, and Interpretation
How are musical ideas carried by bodies, gestures, skills, habits, and relations among performers? Is interpretation the realization of an idea located elsewhere or the production of a new idea? What forms of knowledge become available through rehearsal and performance? How do resistance, fatigue, risk, space, and interaction shape what can be thought musically?
Listening, Memory, and Cognition
How does listening constitute an idea across time? What must be remembered, anticipated, grouped, or forgotten for a relation to become perceptible? Do trained and untrained listeners encounter different ideas, or different accounts of the same one? How do attention, expectation, emotion, and repeated listening transform musical understanding?
History, Culture, and Transmission
How do musical ideas travel through teaching, imitation, oral practice, notation, recording, migration, archives, and institutions? Which concepts depend upon specific historical traditions? How can ideas be compared across cultures without assuming false equivalence? What responsibilities arise when musicians work with inherited, borrowed, marginalized, or contested materials?
Authorship, Agency, and Technology
Who or what can be said to have a musical idea? How is agency distributed among composers, performers, listeners, instruments, algorithms, environments, and communities? What does authorship mean when material is improvised, sampled, collectively produced, or generated by a technical system? How should attribution and responsibility be understood when origins are multiple?
Knowledge, Judgment, and Value
What kinds of knowledge can musical ideas produce? By what criteria are they judged as coherent, original, expressive, significant, or successful? Who establishes these criteria, and how are they shaped by education, institutions, markets, and histories? Can an idea fail artistically yet remain philosophically productive?
Ideas Yet to Be Named
What phenomena do existing musical and philosophical vocabularies fail to describe? Which new distinctions are required by contemporary practices, and which inherited distinctions should be retained, revised, or refused? How can a new concept remain precise enough to be useful without becoming a restrictive category?
DATES
MENTORS
PROGRAMME FORMAT
RESEARCH PREMISE
WHY THE NEW LEXICON?
CENTRAL QUESTIONS
WORKING METHOD
PARTICIPANT VALUE
WHO THE PROGRAMME ADDRESSES
TOWARDS MULTIPLE PHILOSOPHIES OF MUSICAL IDEAS
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