The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Music Improvisation [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, projects, and principal research questions. Each participant or group introduces work in a form appropriate to the project: live or recorded performances, scores, prompts, exercises, texts, diagrams, software, instruments, workshop methods, field materials, portfolios, or other documentation.
This stage does not demand a finished theoretical position or definitive explanation of practice. Its purpose is to make each project’s operative questions visible. Participants will identify the concepts on which their work depends, the conditions enabling improvisation, the methods through which it proceeds, and the artistic or intellectual stakes it claims. Discussion will attend to relations between declared intentions and moment-to-moment decisions, conceptual propositions and embodied action, and a practice’s internal logic and the historical, cultural, technological, and institutional contexts through which it becomes intelligible.
Moderated peer response will help participants distinguish productive questions from premature conclusions, clarify unstable terms, and identify lines of inquiry capable of advancing the work. By the end of Stage I, each participant will have established a provisional account of their practice’s philosophical grounds and a focused set of questions for further 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 philosophy of music improvisation. Moving between shared questions and participants’ projects, the group will treat neither the field nor its boundaries as fixed. It will examine what philosophy of improvisation might need to become, which problems it should address, and which methods are adequate to contemporary practice.
Inquiry may encompass ontological questions concerning the identity of improvised events; epistemological questions concerning what improvisation knows and how such knowledge is enacted and shared; aesthetic questions concerning form, judgment, experience, and value; ethical questions concerning attention, trust, consent, responsibility, and response; technological questions concerning mediation and human or nonhuman agency; institutional questions concerning access, pedagogy, and authority; and political questions concerning how improvisation is produced, circulated, historicized, and heard.
Participants will develop performances, writing, teaching methods, technologies, and artistic-research projects through sustained discussion and reflection. The aim is not to force every project into an academic format or translate embodied knowledge entirely into propositions, but to strengthen conceptual precision, methodological coherence, and communicability. Each participant will formulate trajectories for development, including questions to test, concepts to refine, habits or constraints to reconsider, and forms of public presentation to prepare before the residency.
Stage III | Public Presentation and Exchange | June 2027
The programme culminates in performances, research presentations, lectures, and public discussions at the seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week in Bled, Slovenia. This stage brings work developed through the online seminars into a wider artistic and intellectual context.
Participants will present their research in forms suited to their practices. The emphasis is not solely on completed results or finished artistic products. Public presentation is understood as a further stage of inquiry: an opportunity to test interaction, encounter unforeseen responses, refine language, and consider how improvisational research changes within a shared performative and discursive space.
The Bled residency creates a concentrated setting for exchange among improvisers, theorists, composers, performers, researchers, and audiences. It enables participants to situate projects within broader debates, develop intellectual and professional connections, and contribute to an international discourse on the conditions and possibilities of improvisation 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 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