The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Music Institutions [research group]
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PROGRAMME FORMAT
Stage I | Articulation and Presentation | November 2026
Stage I consists of two online seminars devoted to the presentation and critical articulation of participants’ institutional contexts, current projects, and principal research questions. Each participant or group introduces work in a form appropriate to the inquiry: an organizational case study, artistic intervention, curatorial proposal, pedagogical model, policy draft, archive, programme, diagram, technological system, performance, text, portfolio, or other relevant documentation.
The purpose of this stage is not to require a complete diagnosis or a finished programme of reform. Participants will be invited to describe the institution or institutional pattern at stake, their own position within or in relation to it, the values its procedures enact, the constituencies it addresses, and the consequences it produces. Attention will be given to the difference between formal commitments and everyday operations, between stated missions and actual distributions of authority, and between individual decisions and the systems that condition them.
Moderated peer response will help participants identify assumptions that remain implicit, distinguish structural problems from isolated incidents, and clarify which questions can be investigated within the scope of the residency. Discussion will also consider what evidence is relevant to an institutional claim and how sensitive, situated, or confidential knowledge can be handled responsibly. By the end of Stage I, each participant will have established a provisional account of the philosophical grounds of their inquiry and a focused trajectory for development.
Stage II | Critical Inquiry and Development | February 2027
Stage II consists of two online seminars devoted to collective inquiry into the grounds, methods, scope, and possible functions of a philosophy of music institutions. Rather than treating institutions as neutral containers for pre-existing musical practices, the group will examine how they define categories, establish criteria, allocate resources, organize labor, produce publics, transmit histories, and determine which musical futures become imaginable.
Inquiry may encompass ontological questions concerning what an institution is and where its boundaries lie; epistemological questions concerning whose knowledge counts and how decisions are justified; aesthetic questions concerning judgment, excellence, relevance, and taste; ethical questions concerning care, responsibility, transparency, and consequence; political questions concerning representation, authority, access, and contestation; economic questions concerning funding, ownership, precarity, and value; and technological questions concerning platforms, data, mediation, and visibility.
The aim is not to impose one organizational model or convert every inquiry into policy. It is to strengthen conceptual precision, methodological coherence, practical intelligibility, and awareness of consequences. Each participant will formulate provisional directions for further work, including concepts to be refined, stakeholders to be considered, procedures to be tested, histories to be researched, and formats through which a proposal or argument can be communicated before the public residency.
Stage III | Public Presentation and Exchange | June 2027
The programme culminates in research presentations, lectures, proposals, and public discussions at the seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week in Bled, Slovenia. This stage brings the work developed through the online seminars into a wider artistic, institutional, and intellectual context.
Participants will present the questions, methods, tensions, and outcomes of their research in forms suited to their practices. Public presentation is understood as a further institutional act: an opportunity to test language, make decision-making structures visible, encounter affected perspectives, revise propositions, and consider how an idea changes when it enters a shared forum.
The Bled residency establishes a concentrated setting for exchange among artists, researchers, educators, curators, producers, institutional representatives, and audiences. It enables participants to compare conditions across different regions and organizational scales, develop new intellectual and professional relationships, and contribute to an international discourse on the institutions through which music is made public.
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