[lexicon] I.

 

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RESIDENCY PROGRAM FOR JAZZ ARTISTS

[October 2026 - June 2027]

 

SOURCE, SUBSTANCE, AND STRUCTURE
Performance as Musical Knowledge: Genealogies and Future

 

An international residency investigating the historical foundations and future trajectories of urban music.

 

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PROGRAM AT A GLANCE

 

 

 

Program period: October 2026–June 2027
Format: Four online seminars followed by an on-site residency
Stage I: October 2026 | Two online seminars
Stage II: December 2026 | Two online seminars
Stage III: June 2027 | On-site residency and public presentations
Location: Bled, Slovenia (EU)
Final presentation: Seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week
Application deadline: September 15, 2026

 

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FORMAT

 

Stage I. | October 21, 22, 2026

2 online seminars

– Participants present their artistic practices, performance methodologies, and works in progress

– Q&A

 

Stage II. | December 28, 29, 2026

2 online seminars

– Critical inquiry and practice-led experimentation centered on SOURCE, SUBSTANCE, AND STRUCTURE: Performance as Musical Knowledge

– Q&A

 

Stage III. | June 2027

– Performances, lecture-performances, improvisation laboratories, and research presentations at the seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week in Bled, Slovenia

 

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ABOUT THE RESIDENCY

 

[lexicon] I. is an international, process-oriented residency for jazz artists, improvisers, bands, and ensembles investigating performance as a form of musical knowledge.

 

The program begins from a precise proposition: jazz performance does not merely reproduce knowledge secured in a score, lead sheet, recording, arrangement, archive, repertoire, or convention. It generates, tests, transmits, and revises knowledge through listening, improvising, phrasing, accompanying, remembering, coordinating, and deciding in real time. Performance is therefore not the execution of a prior object, but a situated process through which musical relations become audible and transformable.

 

Jazz is approached neither as a self-contained genre nor as a neutral category detached from history. Its practices emerge through interactions among bodies, instruments, voices, techniques, repertoires, technologies, venues, institutions, economies, and social relations. Ensemble performance further depends upon organizing differences among timbres, histories, competencies, rhythmic functions, and modes of attention.

 

Extending from October 2026 to June 2027, the residency combines four online seminars with an on-site phase at the seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week in Bled, Slovenia. This continuity enables participants to articulate methodologies, situate work historically, test propositions, revise assumptions, and develop precise public presentations.

 

Participants may develop performances, recordings, lecture-performances, improvisation laboratories, artistic research, writing, scores, or documentation. Projects may enter as initial questions, works in progress, established practices requiring re-examination, archival investigations, repertoire studies, or experimental propositions.

 

The residency is organized around three fields:

 

SOURCE concerns the conditions, inheritances, materials, histories, and relations from which jazz and urban musical practices emerge.

 

SUBSTANCE examines the embodied, instrumental, vocal, sonic, rhythmic, technological, and perceptual constitution of performance.

 

STRUCTURE traces the processes through which musical actions and relations acquire coherence, distribute agency, generate form, and transform over time.

 

These terms prescribe no theme. They establish a vocabulary through which heterogeneous practices may be articulated, compared, questioned, and developed.

 

The program welcomes acoustic, amplified, electronic, traditional, contemporary, experimental, notated, oral, improvised, interdisciplinary, site-responsive, and hybrid practices. No aesthetic, repertoire, instrumentation, technique, ensemble model, or relation to notation is privileged. Participants examine what knowledge their practices enact, which assumptions they contest, and what futures they may enable.

 

The residency culminates at the seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week through performances, lecture-performances, improvisation laboratories, research presentations, recordings, or hybrid formats.

 

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MENTORS

 

Dr. Alastair White 

Urban Megušar, Double M.Mus.

Dr. Niki Zohdi

Dr. Dré A. Hočevar 

 

 

COORDINATOR

 

Brina Kren