The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Music Journalism [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 may become more precisely thinkable, communicable, accountable, and historically situated. The following questions establish a shared but non-prescriptive horizon of inquiry.
Journalism and the Musical Object
What is the object of music journalism: a work, performance, recording, artist, scene, institution, technology, audience, or relation among these? How does that choice determine what can be observed and claimed? What happens when music takes the form of a process, environment, online circulation, social practice, or unstable event rather than a bounded work? When does writing about music become writing about labour, identity, politics, or technology?
Description, Interpretation, and Experience
What does it mean to describe sound, and what knowledge can description produce? Can language transmit musical experience, or does it construct another object? How do metaphor, comparison, technical vocabulary, narrative, quotation, and embodied response organise attention? When does interpretation illuminate a work, and when does it displace music with a critic’s framework? How might journalism acknowledge what resists articulation without turning resistance into mystification?
Judgement, Taste, and Value
What is a critical judgement, and on what grounds can it claim validity? Is judgement personal taste, an application of shared criteria, a situated argument, a professional responsibility, or a public proposal open to revision? How are standards such as originality, coherence, virtuosity, relevance, authenticity, innovation, emotional force, and success formed? Can criticism evaluate without ranking or converting difference into a common scale?
Voice, Authority, and Expertise
Who is entitled to speak about music, and how is authority established? Does it arise from specialist knowledge, repeated listening, lived experience, access, affiliation, rhetorical confidence, community recognition, or accountable method? What is concealed by a voice presenting itself as neutral or universal? How can expertise remain rigorous without becoming exclusionary, and accessibility remain generous without reducing complexity?
Evidence, Access, and Independence
What counts as evidence, and how should interviews, archives, memories, documents, statistics, recordings, publicity materials, and observation be weighed? How should uncertainty, contradiction, quotation, anonymity, translation, and verification be handled? How do relationships with artists, publicists, venues, labels, and institutions shape what can be known and said? Is independence a material condition, ethical stance, rhetorical performance, or unattainable ideal? Can advocacy and criticism coexist?
Representation, Identity, and Responsibility
What responsibilities arise when journalism represents people, communities, and histories marked by unequal power? How are identities described without being essentialised, instrumentalised, or detached from self-understanding? Who is granted complexity, privacy, contradiction, and the capacity to change? How should journalists respond when inherited language carries racialised, gendered, colonial, classed, ableist, or nationalist assumptions? What accountability is possible when publication produces consequences beyond the writer’s intentions?
Genre, Scene, Canon, and History
How do journalistic categories organise musical reality? Does genre name sonic properties, social histories, markets, communities, or critical conventions? Who defines a scene, and who remains outside its account? How do reviews, lists, profiles, obituaries, retrospectives, and anniversary features construct canons and periods? Which absences become normal through repetition? Can neglected practices be recovered without simply incorporating them into existing narratives of prestige?
Media, Form, and Technology
How do print, web, audio, video, social media, newsletters, live formats, databases, and emerging technologies shape journalistic thought? Does a medium carry an argument or help produce it? What becomes possible when sound, image, voice, hyperlink, annotation, or audience response enters the work? How do headlines, optimisation, metrics, feeds, recommendation systems, and artificial intelligence affect language, attention, and editorial judgement?
Publics, Institutions, and Economies
Which publics does music journalism imagine, assemble, or exclude? Is an audience a market, readership, community, counterpublic, or temporary relation formed by an address? How do publications, broadcasters, platforms, universities, festivals, labels, funders, and cultural institutions shape journalism? What labour makes it possible, and how do payment, precarity, ownership, and time influence its ethical and intellectual conditions? What responsibilities follow when criticism participates in markets while claiming public value?
Archives, Memory, and Time
How does music journalism mediate between immediacy and historical duration? What does a deadline enable and foreclose? How do first responses harden into received accounts? Which texts remain searchable, preserved, translated, or cited, and which disappear with platforms or publications? How should journalists revisit earlier judgements, correct errors, or acknowledge changed understanding? Can an archive remain open to revision without losing evidentiary force?
Concepts Yet to Be Named
How might music journalism generate concepts for experiences, relations, and forms of public knowledge that existing musical or philosophical vocabularies cannot adequately name? What distinctions are required by contemporary practices, and which inherited distinctions should be retained, revised, or refused? How can new concepts remain precise enough to guide practice without becoming restrictive categories or fashionable substitutes for thought?
These questions do not prescribe a closed theoretical agenda, unified methodology, or authoritative philosophy of music journalism. They establish a deliberately plural field within which participants may formulate problems specific to their practices, test concepts against journalistic encounters, challenge inherited assumptions, and develop positions responsive to the 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 JOURNALISM
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