The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Music Improvisation [research group]
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RESEARCH PREMISE
The New Lexicon proceeds from the premise that improvisational practice is never philosophically neutral. Choices to attend, initiate, respond, interrupt, remember, support, resist, or withdraw do more than shape a performance. Whether explicit or tacit, they entail commitments concerning freedom, agency, knowledge, time, embodiment, relation, authorship, responsibility, and the conditions under which music becomes intelligible.
Improvisation is often defined through oppositions: spontaneous rather than prepared, free rather than determined, oral rather than notated, performative rather than compositional, immediate rather than mediated. Yet practices rarely conform to these divisions. An improvised event may depend upon disciplined preparation, inherited vocabularies, conventions, memories, material limits, and explicit rules. A seemingly free encounter may be shaped by genre, institutional expectation, unequal authority, economic conditions, or assumptions about whose gestures lead and whose support. Conversely, tight constraints may generate invention unavailable within less defined situations.
The residency therefore treats freedom and constraint not as mutually exclusive conditions, but as relations requiring examination. What freedoms become possible through particular limits? Who establishes those limits, and who may alter or refuse them? When does convention enable communication, and when does it regulate difference? How are permission, obligation, expectation, and risk distributed within an ensemble? Improvisation is not simply the absence of determination. It negotiates what is given, possible, emerging, and undecided.
Temporality is central to this negotiation. Improvisation unfolds through an irreversible present that is neither isolated from the past nor empty of anticipation. Memory informs recognition and choice; habits condense experience; expectations project possible futures; recordings and narratives reshape how past events are understood. The improviser acts within a moving relation among retention, attention, and anticipation. A gesture may answer what has occurred, redirect a trajectory, recall a distant event, or create a condition whose significance appears only later.
The programme also examines improvisation as a relational practice. An improvised performance is not merely the sum of individual choices. It may arise through attention, interruption, imitation, resistance, silence, misrecognition, accommodation, and conflict. Agency can be distributed across performers, instruments, acoustics, software, audiences, spaces, environments, and inherited materials. Events cannot always be attributed to one intention, yet distributed agency does not eliminate responsibility. Participants remain accountable for how they listen, exercise authority, respond to vulnerability, and shape possibilities for others.
Improvisational listening is more than the reception of sound. It may involve readiness to be altered, sensitivity to emerging relations, judgment about when to act or refrain, and awareness of how one’s position affects what can be heard. Listening can support reciprocity, but it can also become rhetoric concealing domination or demanding accommodation from those with less power. The programme asks how openness, equality, and dialogue are enacted, and how interaction may be evaluated without idealizing spontaneity.
Embodiment is equally fundamental. Improvisation is performed through trained, fatigued, vulnerable, culturally marked, and technologically extended bodies. Sensation, motor memory, breath, posture, pain, pleasure, and spatial orientation participate in thought. Instruments offer possibilities while resisting or directing action; interfaces translate gestures through designed parameters; environments return sounds unpredictably. Improvisational knowledge may be practical, tacit, affective, proprioceptive, and distributed rather than fully available to verbal explanation.
Improvisation also unsettles conventional accounts of the musical work. If an event cannot be repeated without becoming different, where does its identity reside? Is the work the performance, its enabling conditions, a protocol, a social practice, a recording, a remembered experience, or relations among these? Documentation preserves certain aspects while transforming others. A recording circulates an event beyond its original situation but may shift attention from interaction and space toward a repeatable sonic object. Scores, prompts, and agreements orient action without determining outcomes.
Historical and institutional conditions are inseparable from these questions. Improvisational practices have developed within diverse musical cultures, including traditions where improvisation is central but not named through that category. The term can connect practices, yet it can also erase differences, detach techniques from histories, or privilege narratives derived from particular experimental and academic scenes. An adequate philosophy must consider how concepts travel, who may define them, and which histories become visible or marginalized.
The New Lexicon approaches improvisation both as an object of philosophical examination and as a practice capable of producing philosophical insight. An ensemble may test distributed agency; a solo may expose relations between habit and invention; silence may make responsibility perceptible; technology may complicate intention; an encounter across traditions may reveal the limits of a universal vocabulary. Improvisation does not merely illustrate these problems. By organizing time, attention, embodiment, risk, and relation, it creates situations in which concepts are experienced, revised, or formed.
The central question is not simply, “What does this improvisation mean?” It is also: “What does this practice make thinkable, what relations does it enable, and by what means?” The programme begins from this reciprocal movement between philosophy and improvisation, treating each as capable of transforming the other.
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