The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Music Composition [research group]
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WHY THE NEW LEXICON?
The title The New Lexicon names the need to reconsider the conceptual vocabularies through which compositional practice describes, interprets, and evaluates itself. Established terms such as work, score, form, material, structure, authorship, originality, autonomy, expression, technique, complexity, experimentation, and musical value remain central to compositional discourse. Yet their meanings cannot be assumed to be stable, self-evident, or universally adequate.
These terms have histories. They have emerged within particular aesthetic traditions, institutional formations, technologies, and relations of authority. They enable certain distinctions while obscuring others. They may illuminate one practice while misrepresenting another. New artistic methods, collaborative models, technological systems, conditions of production, and forms of listening continually test their explanatory power. Practices organised around distributed authorship, adaptive systems, ecological relations, embodied knowledge, improvisation, participation, networked performance, artificial intelligence, or unstable media may require existing concepts to be revised, differentiated, or supplemented.
A new lexicon, however, does not entail replacing one vocabulary with another definitive system. The programme does not seek terminological novelty for its own sake, nor does it presume that inherited concepts have simply become obsolete. Its task is more demanding: to examine what existing words permit us to perceive, which assumptions they carry, where they generate confusion, and where new distinctions become necessary.
Lexical inquiry is inseparable from compositional practice. To name a process differently may be to hear, organise, and value it differently. To distinguish intention from agency, material from medium, notation from prescription, work from event, or participation from collaboration is not merely to refine discourse after the fact. Such distinctions can alter the decisions available within practice. Conversely, compositional experimentation may disclose phenomena for which no adequate term yet exists. The new lexicon emerges through this movement between making and naming, experience and articulation, artistic proposition and critical response.
The programme therefore treats vocabulary itself as a site of collective research. Participants will be encouraged to identify key terms within their practices, trace the assumptions attached to them, compare their uses across different contexts, and formulate alternatives where necessary. The objective is not universal agreement, but increased conceptual precision without the erasure of artistic plurality. A productive lexicon should make disagreement more intelligible, not eliminate it.
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