The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Music Management and Leadership [research group]
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CENTRAL QUESTIONS
Participants are invited to interrogate the assumptions structuring their practices and to develop concepts, methods, and vocabularies through which those practices may become more precisely thinkable, communicable, and historically situated. The following questions establish a shared but non-prescriptive horizon.
Purpose, Value, and Musical Life
What is a musical organisation, project, or initiative for? Does it exist to realise artistic ideas, sustain livelihoods, preserve traditions, create public encounters, educate, represent communities, produce knowledge, or transform social relations? How are these purposes ordered when they conflict? What counts as artistic, organisational, public, or social value, who defines it, and can it be evaluated without being reduced to what is easiest to count?
Organisation, Institution, and Public Responsibility
What distinguishes an organisation from an institution, network, platform, collective, or temporary project? When does continuity serve a public or artistic purpose, and when does survival become an end in itself? To whom is an organisation accountable: artists, workers, funders, audiences, communities, boards, law, history, or future generations? How are these obligations negotiated when they cannot all be satisfied?
Leadership, Authority, and Agency
What is leadership in musical life: a position, relation, practice, responsibility, or capacity distributed across a system? How are authority and agency allocated among artistic directors, managers, boards, teams, artists, funders, partners, technologies, and publics? What makes a decision legitimate? How can authority remain decisive without becoming unaccountable, and participation remain meaningful without obscuring responsibility?
Management and Artistic Practice
Where does management end and artistic practice begin? How do programming, commissioning, contracting, scheduling, budgeting, communication, touring, and production shape music’s aesthetic possibilities? Can an organisational structure itself be an artistic proposition? How should managers respond when artistic freedom conflicts with working conditions, public obligations, financial limits, or ethical commitments? What dialogue allows artistic and organisational judgement to challenge rather than subordinate one another?
Labour, Care, and Responsibility
What labour makes musical life possible, and which forms remain invisible, unpaid, precarious, or absorbed into ideas of passion and vocation? How should responsibility be distributed for workload, wellbeing, access, conflict, safeguarding, and the effects of project-based employment? What does care mean within an organisation, and how can it avoid becoming paternalistic, individualised, or detached from material conditions? When does resilience become a demand to endure what should change?
Resources, Economics, and Sustainability
What does it mean to allocate scarce resources justly? How do funding, prices, salaries, fees, ownership, sponsorship, philanthropy, and unpaid contribution shape artistic priorities? Which values resist monetary expression, and how can they enter decisions? Does sustainability refer to financial continuity, ecological responsibility, human capacity, artistic renewal, or all of these? What should be sustained, for whom, and at whose cost?
Audiences, Access, Representation, and Participation
Who is imagined when an organisation speaks of “the audience” or “the public”? Are listeners consumers, citizens, guests, participants, communities, data subjects, or partners? How do venue, price, language, format, etiquette, geography, technology, and representation determine who can enter, belong, or exercise influence? What distinguishes widening access to an existing institution from redistributing authority to shape it?
Technology, Data, and Mediation
How do ticketing systems, databases, streaming platforms, recommendation systems, social media, artificial intelligence, and digital infrastructures mediate organisational knowledge and musical experience? Do data describe audiences and behaviour, or help construct them? Which values are encoded in technical systems, and which work or judgement becomes invisible through automation? How should organisations balance experimentation, access, privacy, labour, environmental cost, and dependence on commercial platforms?
Change, Crisis, and Institutional Futures
What distinguishes meaningful transformation from the performance of change? How should leaders act amid financial instability, political pressure, social conflict, technological disruption, public-health crises, or ecological emergency? Which commitments should remain stable, and which structures should be relinquished? Can an organisation prepare for unpredictable futures without treating uncertainty only as risk? What responsibilities do present decisions create for people and practices not yet represented?
Concepts Yet to Be Named
How might practice generate concepts for relations that existing musical, institutional, and managerial vocabularies cannot name adequately? Which inherited distinctions should be retained, revised, or refused? What terms are needed for collective agency, situated authority, reciprocal support, responsible discontinuation, institutional memory, or values emerging between artistic, social, and organisational domains?
These questions prescribe neither a closed agenda nor an authoritative model of leadership. They establish a deliberately plural field in which participants may formulate context-specific problems, test concepts against practice, challenge inherited assumptions, and develop positions responsive to the consequences of their decisions.
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 MANAGEMENT AND LEADERSHIP
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