The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Music Research [research group]
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RESEARCH PREMISE
The New Lexicon proceeds from the premise that music research is never philosophically or methodologically neutral. Decisions concerning what may count as a musical object, which questions deserve attention, what evidence can support a claim, how analysis and interpretation should proceed, whose testimony carries authority, and by what criteria knowledge is evaluated do more than determine the organisation of a project. Whether explicitly articulated or tacitly operative, such decisions entail commitments concerning reality, knowledge, subjectivity, temporality, embodiment, culture, value, responsibility, and the relation between researcher and researched.
A project may treat a score as a stable object, regard it as one trace within a performance practice, or question whether the category of the work adequately describes the phenomenon under study. It may approach a recording as documentation, event, commodity, technological construction, or historical actor. It may understand an interview as transparent testimony, situated narration, collaborative encounter, or evidence shaped by memory and unequal relations. Each orientation enables particular claims while limiting others, even when its philosophical consequences remain unstated.
The residency therefore approaches music research as an intellectual and social practice in which concepts of object, source, evidence, method, interpretation, explanation, context, voice, rigour, and value are not merely presupposed or applied, but actively produced, negotiated, and contested. Philosophy is understood neither as an external framework imposed upon research nor as abstract commentary added after findings have been reached. It is approached as immanent to inquiry: a means of rendering assumptions legible, clarifying the concepts enacted through research decisions, and examining the historical, institutional, technological, and political conditions through which those decisions acquire meaning and consequence.
This does not imply that every music research project must begin with a philosophical thesis, or that knowledge expressed through sound, performance, embodiment, visualisation, or practice must be translated into conventional prose before it can be taken seriously. On the contrary, the programme asks what forms of understanding become possible through research practices. Listening may reveal relations that a score cannot display. Performance may expose tacit knowledge unavailable to detached observation. Archival arrangement may generate a historical argument. A digital model may make patterns visible while obscuring singular experience. A collaborative process may alter not only the answer to a question, but the ownership and formulation of the question itself.
The programme accordingly investigates a reciprocal relation. It asks not only how philosophy may evaluate the concepts and claims of music research, but also how research practices may challenge philosophical accounts of evidence, objectivity, interpretation, experience, and knowledge. Music research is considered as an object of philosophical examination and as a set of practices capable of producing philosophical insight. The central question is therefore not simply, “What have we discovered about music?” It is also: “How did this inquiry make its object knowable, and what remains outside its terms?”
Such inquiry requires attention to its conditions. The design of a project—its questions, corpus, categories, procedures, technologies, forms of documentation, and modes of presentation—cannot be separated from the infrastructures and institutions that enable it. Research possibilities are shaped by archives, universities, conservatoires, communities, funding systems, publication formats, copyright regimes, databases, languages, professional hierarchies, and inherited narratives of musical significance. To examine the philosophy of music research is therefore also to ask how these conditions legitimise certain objects and methods, marginalise others, and influence what may be recognised as knowledge in the first place.
The New Lexicon treats this expanded field not as a reason to dissolve the specificity of music research, but as a means of describing it more adequately. Research remains a situated practice of asking questions, gathering and constructing evidence, making distinctions, interpreting phenomena, and communicating claims. Yet its identity cannot be secured by a single discipline, medium, method, or standard of proof. The field must be capable of addressing texts and sounds, bodies and environments, histories and systems, close readings and large datasets, individual experience and collective life. Philosophy of music research becomes necessary precisely where inherited definitions no longer account for the plurality, consequences, and possibilities of contemporary inquiry.
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