The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Music Institutions [research group]
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CENTRAL QUESTIONS
Participants are invited to interrogate the presuppositions that organize musical institutions and to develop concepts, methods, and vocabularies through which those structures may become more precisely thinkable, communicable, and changeable. The following questions establish a shared but non-prescriptive horizon of inquiry.
Institution and Institutional Life
What makes a music institution an institution? Is it a legal organization, a building, a recurring procedure, a professional norm, a network of relationships, a shared fiction, or an expectation that persists across generations? Where do institutional boundaries begin and end? How do formal organizations interact with informal scenes, customs, platforms, markets, and disciplinary habits? When does an experimental initiative become institutional, and what is gained or lost in that transition?
Value, Judgment, and Legitimation
How do institutions establish musical value? Through which criteria, juries, rankings, reviews, credentials, commissions, prizes, repertoires, and narratives does a practice become legitimate? Who is recognized as capable of judgment, and how is that authority acquired? Can criteria be made explicit without becoming reductive?
Governance, Authority, and Accountability
Where is decision-making power located, and how does it move through boards, artistic leadership, administration, funders, staff, artists, partners, and publics? Which decisions are open to participation, which remain delegated, and why? What forms of transparency are meaningful rather than merely procedural? How can responsibility be maintained when authority is distributed? What mechanisms allow institutional commitments to be challenged, evaluated, and revised?
Access, Exclusion, and Belonging
Who can enter, remain within, influence, and benefit from an institution? How do fees, geography, architecture, schedules, language, disability access, informal codes, professional networks, and expectations of prior knowledge shape participation? What is the difference between being represented, being welcomed, belonging, and possessing authority? How can institutions address historical exclusion without treating participants as symbols or reducing structural questions to visibility?
Labor, Care, and Sustainability
Whose work sustains musical institutions, under what conditions, and with what recognition? How are artistic, administrative, pedagogical, technical, emotional, and volunteer labor valued differently? Which forms of flexibility depend upon precarity or invisible care? How might institutions balance continuity with the well-being of the people who maintain them? What would ecological, financial, and social sustainability require when these demands conflict?
Education, Expertise, and Transmission
How do institutions define expertise and transmit musical knowledge? Which repertoires, techniques, histories, and modes of listening become canonical, and which remain peripheral? How do credentials relate to competence, authority, or access to work? Can educational institutions preserve demanding forms of study while questioning inherited hierarchies? What reciprocal forms of learning become possible among artists, teachers, students, communities, technologies, and archives?
Publics, Participation, and Community
How do institutions imagine the people they address? Is a public understood as an audience, market, constituency, community, participant, partner, or co-governor? Who defines the terms of engagement? Does participation alter artistic or institutional decisions, or does it occur within a framework already fixed? How can long-term relationships be distinguished from extractive outreach? What obligations accompany claims to public value?
Infrastructure, Technology, and Mediation
How do buildings, instruments, platforms, databases, application systems, algorithms, contracts, and technical standards shape institutional possibility? Which practices become easier to present, archive, measure, or fund because they fit existing infrastructures? Which become costly or illegible? How do technologies distribute visibility and control? What forms of dependence arise when public or artistic functions are delegated to commercial systems?
History, Memory, and Institutional Time
How do institutions narrate their histories, preserve archives, and decide what deserves continuity? Which absences are acknowledged, and which are reproduced through cataloguing, commemoration, and programming? How do seasonal planning, short-term funding, permanent collections, and long-term mandates produce different temporal priorities? What does an institution owe to inherited practices, present participants, and future publics? When should continuity give way to refusal, repair, or reinvention?
Institutional Imagination and Transformation
How can institutions change? Which transformations require revised language, redistributed authority, different resources, new legal structures, altered habits, or the creation of another institution altogether? How can experiments be evaluated without demanding immediate scalability? What can be learned from artist-led, cooperative, temporary, nomadic, or para-institutional models? How might music itself provide methods for organizing attention, relation, plurality, and collective decision?
Concepts Yet to Be Named
Which institutional phenomena remain inadequately described by existing artistic, philosophical, and managerial vocabularies? What distinctions are required to speak precisely about complicity, interdependence, repair, refusal, maintenance, hospitality, institutional memory, or distributed responsibility? Which inherited concepts should be retained, revised, combined, or rejected?
These questions do not prescribe a unified theory, a standard model of governance, or an ideal institution. They establish a common yet deliberately plural field within which participants may formulate problems specific to their situations, test concepts against actual procedures, compare structures, and develop propositions responsive to the consequences of institutional action.
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 INSTITUTIONS
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