The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Music Improvisation [research group]
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CENTRAL QUESTIONS
Participants are invited to interrogate the presuppositions that structure their practices and to develop the concepts, methods, and vocabularies through which those practices may become more precisely thinkable, communicable, and historically situated. The following questions establish a shared but non-prescriptive horizon of inquiry.
Freedom, Constraint, and Possibility
What does freedom mean in improvisation? Is it the absence of rules, the capacity to transform them, responsiveness within limits, or access to possibilities that a situation makes available? How do constraints enable invention, and when do they become coercive or exclusionary? Who defines the terms of participation, and how may those terms be negotiated, resisted, or changed during performance?
Preparation, Spontaneity, and Habit
Where does improvisation begin? How do training, rehearsal, memory, repertoire, technique, convention, and embodied habit participate in apparently spontaneous action? Can a gesture be prepared without being predetermined? When does fluency enable responsiveness, and when does it reproduce familiar patterns? How might improvisers cultivate availability to what they do not already know how to do?
Time, Emergence, and Form
How does form arise in real time? Is it intentionally projected, collectively negotiated, retrospectively recognized, or produced through interactions no participant controls? How do memory and anticipation shape the present? What kinds of continuity, repetition, interruption, and surprise allow an event to become intelligible without closing its future in advance?
Agency, Intention, and Authorship
Where is agency located within an improvised event? How are intention and authorship distributed among performers, listeners, instruments, software, spaces, histories, and material conditions? Can an event have direction without a directing subject? What does it mean to claim authorship over an outcome dependent upon collective action, contingency, or processes that exceed individual control?
Interaction, Listening, and Responsibility
What distinguishes interaction from genuine reciprocity? How are attention, trust, consent, support, interruption, refusal, and care enacted musically? When should an improviser respond, and when might nonresponse be the more responsible action? How do differences in authority, confidence, audibility, identity, or institutional status shape whose initiatives are followed and whose are ignored?
Embodiment, Skill, and Knowledge
What forms of knowledge are carried in gesture, sensation, breath, touch, timing, and motor memory? How are such forms of knowing cultivated, communicated, and evaluated? What assumptions about ability, virtuosity, control, and expression are embedded in improvisational pedagogy? How do fatigue, disability, vulnerability, pleasure, and physical risk alter the possibilities of musical action?
Material, Technology, and Environment
How do instruments, interfaces, acoustics, objects, software, networks, and environmental processes participate in improvisation? Are they tools, constraints, partners, agents, or conditions of possibility? How do technical systems anticipate and classify action? What forms of dependence, opacity, authorship, labour, and responsibility arise when improvisers interact with automated or adaptive technologies?
History, Culture, and Institution
How have traditions, scenes, educational systems, festivals, recordings, archives, and critical narratives shaped what counts as improvisation? Which practices are recognized under that name, and which are excluded or absorbed without adequate historical attention? How do concepts such as freedom, innovation, authenticity, and experimentation change across cultural contexts? What responsibilities arise in encounters among distinct traditions?
Judgment, Value, and Failure
By what criteria is improvisation judged, and who has authority to establish those criteria? What do coherence, originality, sensitivity, intensity, risk, communication, and success mean in practices whose outcomes are not fixed in advance? Can failure be distinguished from difficulty, refusal, misunderstanding, or productive disruption? How might evaluation remain rigorous without rewarding only familiar signs of fluency?
Concepts Yet to Be Named
How might improvisational practice generate concepts for phenomena that existing musical and philosophical vocabularies cannot adequately name? What distinctions are required by contemporary forms of collective action, technological mediation, ecological relation, and intercultural encounter? Which inherited concepts should be retained, revised, pluralized, or refused? How can new terms remain precise enough to be useful without becoming restrictive categories?
These questions do not prescribe a closed theoretical agenda, a unified methodology, or an authoritative philosophy of improvisation. They establish a common yet deliberately plural field of investigation within which participants may formulate problems specific to their practices, test concepts against artistic processes, challenge inherited assumptions, and develop positions responsive to the particular demands of their work.
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 IMPROVISATION
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