The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Music Research [research group]
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CENTRAL QUESTIONS
Participants are invited to interrogate the presuppositions that structure their inquiries and to develop the concepts, methods, and vocabularies through which their work may become more precisely thinkable, communicable, and accountable. The following questions establish a shared but non-prescriptive horizon.
Research Objects and Musical Phenomena
What makes something available as an object of music research? Is the object discovered, selected, delimited, constructed, or co-produced through the inquiry? Where might its identity reside: in a score, sounding event, practice, body, recording, memory, institution, environment, dataset, or relation among these? What is excluded when a fluid practice is stabilised as a work, tradition, genre, corpus, or case?
Questions, Methods, and Evidence
How does a research question organise what can become visible, audible, measurable, or sayable? Do methods answer questions already formed, or participate in producing them? What counts as evidence within different approaches, and why? How do documents, testimony, notation, recordings, observation, performance, statistics, and sensory experience support different kinds of claim? What happens when forms of evidence conflict?
Description, Interpretation, and Explanation
What distinguishes description from interpretation, and interpretation from explanation? Can any account remain purely descriptive? How are causal, historical, formal, cultural, and experiential explanations justified? Which roles do comparison, inference, speculation, and critique play? How should researchers respond when several interpretations remain plausible, or when the demand for resolution diminishes the complexity of the phenomenon?
Archives, Fields, and Corpora
How are archives, fields, collections, repertoires, and datasets constituted? Who determines what is preserved, catalogued, accessible, representative, or absent? How do archival arrangements and metadata shape historical knowledge? What changes when research takes place through fieldwork, remote access, digital repositories, private collections, or community-held materials? How should silence, loss, refusal, and incomplete documentation be interpreted?
Listening, Embodiment, and Practice
What kinds of listening does research require, cultivate, or exclude? How do bodily skill, fatigue, memory, affect, movement, and situated experience participate in knowing music? Can performance, composition, improvisation, reconstruction, or making function as research methods rather than illustrations of prior claims? How may tacit and practical knowledge be communicated without reducing it to what can be stated propositionally?
Position, Voice, and Responsibility
How does the researcher’s position shape access, attention, interpretation, and authority? Who speaks, for whom, to whom, and under what conditions? How should consent, anonymity, attribution, translation, care, reciprocity, and refusal be understood across different research settings? What responsibilities arise when inquiry concerns vulnerable people, contested histories, sacred practices, personal archives, or culturally restricted knowledge?
Technology, Data, and Models
How do recording systems, analytical software, databases, visualisations, machine learning, and other technical infrastructures mediate research thought? Do they process objects already given, or help produce the phenomena they claim to analyse? Which assumptions are embedded in categories, interfaces, training data, and metrics? What kinds of scale, pattern, or comparison become possible, and which singularities disappear?
Knowledge, Judgement, and Validity
What forms of knowledge can music research produce? By what criteria should claims be judged, and are those criteria transferable across historical, ethnographic, analytical, philosophical, scientific, and artistic approaches? How do accuracy, coherence, transparency, reflexivity, reproducibility, plausibility, resonance, usefulness, and ethical accountability relate? Who has the authority to determine when an inquiry is rigorous or significant?
Discipline, Institution, and Publics
How do disciplinary conventions, educational models, funding structures, publication systems, languages, copyright regimes, and evaluation practices enable or delimit research? Which musical histories and communities are treated as central, and which remain peripheral or unrecognised? How are scholarly values entangled with institutional power? What might public responsibility, accessibility, collaboration, or impact mean beyond administrative metrics?
Concepts Yet to Be Named
How might music research generate concepts for phenomena that existing musical, scholarly, and philosophical vocabularies cannot adequately name? Which distinctions are required by contemporary inquiries, and which inherited distinctions should be retained, revised, or refused? How can new concepts remain precise enough to guide thought while remaining open to difference, translation, and change?
These questions do not prescribe a closed agenda, a unified methodology, or an authoritative philosophy of music research. They establish a common yet deliberately plural field within which participants may formulate problems specific to their projects, test concepts against materials and practices, challenge inherited assumptions, and develop positions responsive to the demands and consequences of their work.
DATES
MENTORS
PROGRAMME FORMAT
RESEARCH PREMISE
WHY THE NEW LEXICON?
CENTRAL QUESTIONS
WORKING METHOD
PARTICIPANT VALUE
WHO THE PROGRAMME ADDRESSES
TOWARDS MULTIPLE PHILOSOPHIES OF MUSIC RESEARCH
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