The New Lexicon I.
Philosophy of Music Management and Leadership [research group]
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RESEARCH PREMISE
The New Lexicon proceeds from the premise that music management and leadership are never philosophically neutral. Decisions concerning what is programmed, commissioned, funded, promoted, preserved, or discontinued do more than organise activity around musical work. Choices about participation, labour, authority, risk, audiences, evidence, and success entail commitments regarding value, knowledge, agency, justice, responsibility, and the purposes musical institutions are understood to serve.
A management practice may treat an organisation as an instrument for realising artistic vision, a workplace constituted by reciprocal obligations, a public institution accountable to communities, a temporary network assembled around projects, or an economic actor competing for resources and attention. It may locate leadership in one individual, distribute it among teams and partners, or understand it as a situated capacity that changes with context. It may regard audiences as consumers, citizens, participants, data profiles, witnesses, collaborators, or co-producers of value. Each orientation carries consequences, even when they remain unstated.
The residency approaches management and leadership as intellectual, practical, and social activities in which organisation, mission, value, authority, service, excellence, innovation, access, sustainability, professionalism, and care are actively produced, negotiated, and contested. Philosophy is understood neither as an external framework imposed upon practice nor as commentary added after decisions are made. It is immanent to management and leadership: a means of making assumptions legible, clarifying the concepts enacted through organisational choices, and examining the historical, economic, legal, technological, and political conditions through which those choices acquire meaning.
This does not imply that every decision must illustrate a philosophical thesis or that practical knowledge must become conventional academic argument. The programme asks what forms of thought become possible through management and leadership themselves. A programming process may argue for a conception of cultural value. A budget may disclose priorities more clearly than a mission statement. A governance structure may embody a theory of authority. A rehearsal schedule may reveal assumptions about labour, bodies, and care. A partnership may test reciprocity. An audience strategy may construct an idea of the public before a listener enters the room.
Management is often described as supporting artistic practice from outside, while leadership supplies vision and direction. The New Lexicon questions this separation. Organisational decisions enter the substance of musical life: they determine which projects receive time, space, continuity, and resources; which risks are accepted; whose expertise is heard; which working conditions are normalised; and which encounters become possible. Artistic and organisational judgements remain distinguishable, but they are not independent. A philosophy of music management must therefore examine how organisational form participates in artistic form and how institutional conduct becomes part of musical meaning.
The programme also investigates authority and responsibility. Leadership discourse often celebrates decisiveness, vision, resilience, charisma, innovation, or transformation, but these terms can obscure dependence, collective labour, inherited privilege, structural constraint, or consequences borne by others. Distributed leadership may promise inclusion while leaving formal power unchanged or responsibility unclear. The question is not simply whether authority is centralised or shared, but how decisions become legitimate, contestable, revisable, and accountable.
Inquiry must address internal organisation and the external conditions that enable it. Musical possibilities are shaped by public policy, markets, philanthropy, education, employment law, funding criteria, property regimes, digital platforms, touring economies, media systems, demographic change, and ecological limits. Metrics, reporting requirements, recommendation systems, ticketing technologies, and social media do not merely document activity; they influence what organisations notice, reward, repeat, and imagine. Philosophy of music management therefore asks how these conditions authorise certain forms of musical life, marginalise others, and define what appears viable, excellent, relevant, or worthy of support.
This expanded field does not dissolve music management into generic organisational theory. Musical organisations coordinate ephemeral events, specialised practices, embodied labour, symbolic value, long preparation, and uncertain public encounters. They often operate between artistic autonomy and public accountability, intrinsic and instrumental value, continuity and experimentation, vocation and employment, local responsibility and international circulation. Their outcomes may be difficult to measure, yet their consequences remain concrete.
Music management and leadership can therefore be understood both as objects of philosophical examination and as practices capable of producing philosophical insight. The central question is not only, “How can this organisation perform more effectively?” It is also: “What understanding of musical life does this practice enact, whose possibilities does it expand or restrict, and by what means?”
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