The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Music Composition [research group]
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CENTRAL QUESTIONS
Participants are invited to interrogate the presuppositions that structure their practices and to develop the concepts, methods, and vocabularies through which those practices may become more precisely thinkable, communicable, and historically situated. The following questions establish a shared but non-prescriptive horizon of inquiry.
Composition and the Musical Idea
What constitutes a compositional idea? Is an idea an intention prior to the work, a rule that organises its production, a perceptible relation within the sounding result, a problem discovered through making, or an account constructed retrospectively around the project? Through which conceptual, material, embodied, social, and technological processes does an idea become notation, sound, action, relation, or experience? What is gained or lost as the idea moves among these forms?
Work, Event, and Identity
What is the ontological status of a musical work? Where might its identity reside: in the score, the sounding event, the performing body, the technological apparatus, the listening situation, the documentation, or the relations among them? How much variation can a work sustain while retaining its identity? What happens when composition produces processes, environments, protocols, or situations rather than stable objects?
Form, Material, and Time
How are musical form and material constituted? To what extent are they discovered, constructed, inherited, negotiated, or retrospectively attributed? Can material be separated from the technologies, bodies, histories, and economies through which it becomes available? Is form an internal organisation, a mode of experience, a social convention, or an interaction among these dimensions? How do different conceptions of time alter what composition can organise and what listeners can recognise?
Authorship, Agency, and Responsibility
How are authorship, intentionality, responsibility, and agency distributed among composers, performers, listeners, instruments, environments, institutions, and technologies? What does it mean to claim authorship when outcomes depend on improvisation, chance, collective decision, automated systems, or nonhuman processes? How should responsibility be understood when agency is distributed but consequences remain real?
Notation, Technology, and Mediation
How do notation, media, instruments, software, recording systems, and other technical infrastructures mediate compositional thought? Do they represent ideas already formed, or do they participate in producing what can be imagined? Which possibilities does a medium afford, and which does it exclude? How do technical systems encode aesthetic assumptions, labour relations, forms of access, and models of control?
Performance, Embodiment, and Listening
What kinds of bodies, skills, modes of attention, and relations does a composition presuppose? How are performers positioned as interpreters, executants, collaborators, co-authors, or subjects of a system? What conceptions of listening are built into compositional choices? Is the listener imagined as an observer, participant, analyst, consumer, witness, or co-producer of musical meaning? How do space, fatigue, memory, sensation, and social context shape the experience of a work?
Knowledge, Judgement, and Value
What forms of knowledge can composition produce? How might such knowledge be articulated, evaluated, transmitted, or shared without being reduced to propositional claims? By what criteria are compositional decisions evaluated, and who is authorised to establish those criteria? How are concepts such as coherence, originality, innovation, complexity, expression, relevance, and success historically and institutionally constituted?
Institution, History, and Politics
How do disciplinary conventions, educational models, material infrastructures, funding systems, publishing practices, performance institutions, and curatorial structures enable, govern, or delimit what composition can be? Which histories are treated as central, and which practices remain marginal or unrecognised? How are aesthetic values entangled with social relations and political circumstances? What responsibilities arise when composition engages communities, archives, technologies, environments, or contested forms of representation?
Concepts Yet to Be Named
How might compositional practice generate concepts for phenomena that existing musical and philosophical vocabularies cannot adequately name? What new distinctions are required by contemporary practices, and which 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 composition. They establish a common yet deliberately plural field of investigation within which participants may formulate problems specific to their practices, test concepts against artistic processes, challenge inherited assumptions, and develop positions responsive to the particular demands of their work.
DATES
MENTORS
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