The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Music Education [research group]
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CENTRAL QUESTIONS
Participants are invited to interrogate the presuppositions structuring their practices and to develop concepts, methods, and vocabularies through which those practices become more precisely thinkable, communicable, and historically situated. The following questions establish a shared but non-prescriptive horizon of inquiry.
Music, Education, and Purpose
What makes an encounter with music educational? Is education the acquisition of skills, transformation of perception, initiation into a practice, development of judgement, formation of identity, expansion of agency, or creation of shared worlds? Who determines the purposes of music education, and how are they negotiated with learners and communities? Can music be valued in itself without ignoring the conditions through which value is experienced?
Musical Knowledge and Understanding
What does it mean to know music? Does musical knowledge reside in concepts, notation, embodied technique, aural memory, interpretive judgement, cultural participation, technological fluency, or the capacity to act with others? How are these forms related, and why are some more readily recognised or assessed? What remains tacit in expert practice, and how can it be shared without being reduced?
Teacher, Learner, and Authority
How are authority, agency, trust, vulnerability, and responsibility distributed within educational relationships? What gives a teacher the right to direct another person’s attention, effort, body, or interpretation? How can expertise guide learning without fixing what a learner may become? When should an educator lead, withdraw, challenge, care, or refuse? What becomes possible when teachers are also learners?
Curriculum, Repertoire, and Canon
What does a curriculum claim is worth knowing? How are repertoires selected, ordered, contextualised, and related to learners’ lives? Which histories are presented as central, universal, advanced, or exemplary, and which remain peripheral? Can traditions be taught critically without being insulated from question or dismissed in advance? What responsibilities arise when teaching across cultural, social, or historical difference?
Pedagogy, Assessment, and Value
By what criteria is musical learning evaluated, and who establishes them? What do examinations, auditions, grades, portfolios, performances, and informal judgements reveal or conceal? How do accuracy, expression, originality, discipline, complexity, fluency, and professionalism become standards of value? Can assessment support reflection and growth without narrowing learning to what can be measured?
Creativity, Interpretation, and Participation
What is creativity in music education: an individual capacity, social process, mode of attention, relation to tradition, or institutional category? How are composing, improvising, interpreting, arranging, producing, listening, and curating differently valued? What separates meaningful participation from managed involvement? How can learners exercise agency within forms, repertoires, technologies, and communities they did not choose?
Embodiment, Listening, and Difference
What bodies, senses, memories, languages, and modes of attention does music education presume? How do fatigue, pleasure, anxiety, pain, neurodiversity, disability, age, and prior experience shape learning? Which bodies are treated as normal, trainable, expressive, or professionally viable? How might listening become an ethical and relational practice? What changes when difference is treated as generative rather than deficient?
Technology, Media, and Mediation
How do instruments, notation, recordings, software, platforms, algorithms, and artificial intelligence participate in learning? Do they deliver content, or help determine what music and knowledge can be? Which forms of agency do technologies enable, distribute, or remove? How do systems encode assumptions about authorship, progress, attention, labour, privacy, accessibility, and control?
Institution, Community, and Politics
How do schools, conservatoires, universities, examination systems, community organisations, cultural institutions, and funding structures define legitimate music education? Who gains access, who belongs, and who must adapt? How are educational values entangled with labour, cultural policy, professional hierarchies, and inequality? What responsibilities arise when educators work with communities, traditions, archives, environments, or contested representation?
Concepts Yet to Be Named
How might educational practice generate concepts for experiences that existing musical and philosophical vocabularies cannot name adequately? Which distinctions are required by contemporary learning, and which inherited distinctions should be retained, revised, or refused? How can new concepts remain precise enough to guide practice without becoming restrictive labels? What might learners contribute to the language through which education understands them?
These questions prescribe neither a closed theoretical agenda nor an authoritative philosophy of music education. They establish a common yet plural field in which participants can formulate problems specific to their contexts, test concepts against practice, challenge inherited assumptions, and develop positions responsive to the people and situations with whom they 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 EDUCATION
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