The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Music Composition [research group]
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RESEARCH PREMISE
The New Lexicon proceeds from the premise that compositional practice is never philosophically neutral. Decisions concerning what may count as musical material, how form is constituted, where agency is located, how notation and technology mediate thought, what relations obtain among composer, performer, work, and listener, and by what means musical value is established do more than determine the technical organisation of a musical work. Whether explicitly articulated or tacitly operative, such decisions entail commitments concerning ontology, epistemology, subjectivity, temporality, embodiment, sociality, responsibility, and the conditions under which music becomes intelligible.
A compositional practice may, for example, treat the score as the primary locus of the work or regard it as one element within a broader network of actions, bodies, technologies, and situations. It may situate authorship in individual intention, distribute agency among human and nonhuman participants, or question whether the category of authorship adequately describes the work at all. It may understand musical material as given, discovered, selected, constructed, historically sedimented, technologically produced, or socially negotiated. Each of these orientations carries philosophical consequences, even where those consequences remain unstated.
The residency therefore approaches composition as an intellectual, artistic, and social practice in which concepts of form, material, authorship, agency, technology, temporality, notation, embodiment, performance, and listening are not merely presupposed or applied, but actively produced, negotiated, and contested. Philosophy is understood neither as an external framework imposed upon musical practice nor as retrospective commentary added once a work is complete. It is approached as immanent to compositional activity: as a means of making its 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 approach does not imply that every composition must illustrate a philosophical thesis or that compositional knowledge must be translated into conventional academic argument before it can be taken seriously. On the contrary, the programme asks what forms of thought become possible through compositional procedures themselves. The organisation of sound, duration, action, notation, space, technology, embodiment, and attention may disclose relations that cannot be fully articulated in propositional language. A score may function as a model of agency; a performance situation may test an account of responsibility; a technological system may reconfigure agency; a temporal process may render a philosophical problem perceptible before it can be named.
The programme accordingly investigates the reciprocal relation between philosophy and composition. It asks not only how philosophy may interpret composition, but also how composition may operate as a distinctive form of conceptual, speculative, and critical inquiry. Composition 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 work mean?” It is also: “What does this practice make thinkable, and by what means?”
Such inquiry demands attention to both the internal organisation of projects and the external conditions that enable them. A project’s materials, procedures, notation, form, temporal logic, and modes of interaction cannot be separated from the infrastructures and institutions through which it becomes possible. Compositional possibilities are shaped by instruments, technologies, educational systems, funding structures, publishing conventions, economies of performance, disciplinary categories, curatorial decisions, and inherited narratives of value. To examine the philosophy of composition is therefore also to ask how these conditions authorise certain practices, marginalise others, and influence what can be recognised as composition in the first place.
The New Lexicon treats this expanded field not as a reason to dissolve the specificity of composition, but as a means of describing that specificity more adequately. Composition remains a situated practice of making decisions, constructing relations, organising attention, and proposing forms. Yet its identity cannot be secured by a single medium, technique, institution, or historical definition. The field must be capable of addressing scores and sonic events, bodies and environments, algorithms and instruments, individual authorship and collective process, aesthetic autonomy and social implication. Philosophy of music composition becomes necessary precisely where inherited definitions cease to account for the plurality of contemporary practice.
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