The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Music Evolution [research group]
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WHY THE NEW LEXICON?
The title The New Lexicon names the need to reconsider the vocabularies through which musical change is described, explained, modelled, and evaluated. Terms such as origin, development, influence, tradition, innovation, adaptation, progress, survival, emergence, intelligence, creativity, hybridity, and extinction are common across research and development. Yet their meanings are rarely stable or innocent. Each term proposes a relation between past and present, identifies certain agents and mechanisms, and carries assumptions about continuity, causation, value, and direction.
These words travel among biology, anthropology, philosophy, history, computation, engineering, economics, and the arts. Their transfer can generate insight, but it can also conceal differences between fields. A genre does not reproduce as an organism does; a recording does not inherit in the same way as a body; a model does not understand music merely because it predicts a pattern; and an institution does not become extinct in precisely the same sense as a species. When distinctions disappear, evolutionary or technical language may offer the appearance of explanation without identifying an actual process.
A new lexicon does not mean replacing one vocabulary with another definitive system. Nor does it require terminological novelty for its own sake. The programme asks what existing words allow researchers and developers to perceive, where they become misleading, and which new distinctions are demanded by contemporary musical realities. Concepts may need to be revised, limited, combined, translated, or refused. Vocabularies developed through non-Western histories, Indigenous knowledge, feminist and decolonial thought, disability studies, media archaeology, ecology, community practice, and technical development may challenge inherited narratives and disclose other forms of continuity and transformation.
Lexical inquiry is inseparable from method and design. To describe a process as adaptation rather than progress, drift rather than decline, reactivation rather than revival, or coevolution rather than influence alters the questions asked, evidence gathered, and systems built. Conversely, a new method or technology may produce relations for which no adequate term exists. The programme therefore treats vocabulary as a site of collective research: a means of increasing conceptual precision while sustaining plurality and intelligible disagreement.
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 EVOLUTION
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