The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Music Education [research group]
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WHY THE NEW LEXICON?
The title The New Lexicon names the need to reconsider the vocabularies through which music education describes, organises, and evaluates itself. Terms such as talent, ability, progress, creativity, discipline, literacy, participation, inclusion, excellence, tradition, musicianship, and success circulate across classrooms, conservatoires, policy, research, and public debate. Yet their meanings are neither stable nor innocent.
These terms have histories. They emerge within particular pedagogies, institutions, traditions, developmental theories, technologies, and relations of authority. They make some forms of learning visible while obscuring others. Literacy may clarify symbolic competence while relegating aural, embodied, improvisatory, technological, or community knowledge to secondary status. Excellence may sustain demanding work while naturalising exclusion. Participation may mean shared agency, attendance, or compliance, depending on how it is enacted.
New practices continually test inherited language. Collaborative composition, culturally sustaining pedagogy, disability arts, community music, informal learning, digital production, artificial intelligence, ecological education, and learner-led practice may require familiar concepts to be differentiated, revised, or replaced. Apparent novelty can also conceal older assumptions. A platform may promise autonomy while intensifying surveillance; creativity may reproduce narrow ideals of originality; an inclusive curriculum may add repertoire without redistributing authority.
A new lexicon does not mean substituting one definitive vocabulary for another. The programme neither pursues novelty for its own sake nor presumes inherited concepts should be abandoned. It examines what existing terms allow educators to perceive, which values they carry, where they create confusion, and where new distinctions are necessary.
Lexical inquiry is inseparable from practice. To name a learner differently may change how their capacities are heard. To distinguish access from belonging, instruction from education, achievement from development, voice from agency, or participation from decision-making is not merely to improve discourse afterward. Such distinctions alter choices within curricula, relationships, institutions, and assessment. Educational encounters may also disclose experiences for which no adequate term exists. The new lexicon emerges between teaching and reflection, listening and naming, critique and practical invention.
The programme therefore treats vocabulary as collective research. Participants will identify key terms, trace attached assumptions, compare their use across contexts, and formulate alternatives where necessary. The aim is not agreement, but greater precision without erasing pedagogical, cultural, or musical plurality. A productive lexicon should make disagreement more intelligible and responsibility more exacting.
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