The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Music History [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’ practices, current projects, and principal research questions. Each participant or group introduces work in a form appropriate to the project: archival materials, manuscripts, editions, recordings, oral histories, field notes, databases, maps, timelines, essays, book chapters, exhibitions, digital platforms, lecture-performances, podcasts, or other relevant documentation.
This stage does not require a finished historiographical position; it makes each practice’s operative questions visible. Participants identify key concepts, forms of evidence, temporal and geographical frames, explanatory methods, and intellectual or public stakes. Discussion considers relations between source and interpretation, archive and narrative, chronology and causality, local specificity and wider claims, and a project’s internal logic and conditions of intelligibility.
Moderated peer response will help participants distinguish productive questions from premature conclusions, clarify unstable terms, identify exclusions within their materials, and recognise lines of inquiry capable of advancing the work. By the end of Stage I, each participant will have a provisional account of their practice’s philosophical grounds and focused questions for development.
Stage II | Critical Inquiry and Development | February 2027
Stage II consists of two online seminars on the grounds, methods, scope, ethics, and functions of philosophy of music history. Moving between shared questions and participants’ projects, the group will consider what this field might become, which problems it should address, and which methods respond adequately to plural musical pasts and historical practices.
Inquiry may encompass ontological questions about the entities and events of musical history; epistemological questions about absent sounds and past experience; methodological questions about evidence, inference, comparison, periodisation, and scale; aesthetic questions about historically formed judgement and value; ethical questions about representation, testimony, recovery, and harm; technological questions about preservation and access; institutional questions about authority and canon formation; and political questions about whose pasts are remembered or silenced.
Participants will develop articles, chapters, editions, archives, digital projects, exhibitions, lectures, and other historical research through sustained discussion. The aim is not to impose one academic format, but to strengthen conceptual precision, evidentiary responsibility, methodological coherence, and communicability. Each participant will establish a trajectory for development, including claims to test, concepts to refine, sources and absences to reconsider, and presentation forms to prepare before the residency.
Stage III | Public Presentation and Exchange | June 2027
The programme culminates in research presentations, lectures, 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, scholarly, and public context.
Participants will present their questions, methods, propositions, and outcomes in forms suited to their practices. The emphasis is not solely on completed results. Public presentation is a further stage of inquiry: an opportunity to test arguments, encounter responses, refine language, make sources and methods visible, and consider how historical knowledge changes in a shared discursive space.
The Bled residency creates a concentrated setting for exchange among historians, composers, performers, archivists, curators, researchers, and audiences. It enables participants to situate projects within broader debates, develop intellectual and professional connections, and contribute to international discourse on the responsibilities and possibilities of writing music history today.
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 HISTORY
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