[IDEA] I. 

 

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PROGRAM STRUCTURE

 

The residency proceeds through three consecutive stages, each fulfilling a distinct function within the inquiry. The trajectory moves from the articulation and contextualization of participants’ practices toward critical investigation, practice-led experimentation, and public presentation at the festival.

 

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Stage I. | October 2026

2 online seminars

 

The first stage establishes the residency’s shared artistic, methodological, and discursive foundations.

 

Participants introduce their practices, working methods, selected performances, current projects, and research questions. These presentations establish a common basis for examining the interpretative, historical, technical, relational, and methodological positions represented across the cohort.

 

Participants present the repertoires, materials, recordings, documents, works in progress, or research frameworks they propose to develop. Artists describe their approaches to interpretation, embodied technique, source criticism, rehearsal, decision-making, and collective artistic organization.

 

The seminars establish an initial exchange of perspectives and enable participants to formulate questions that will orient subsequent project development. Inquiry may address relations among historical inheritance, embodied technique, sonic materiality, performer interaction, emergent form, performance documentation, and the edition’s conceptual framework, with attention to how these dimensions become mutually operative in concrete acts of performance.

 

Stage I includes:

– 2 online seminars

– Presentation of participants’ practices and artistic methodologies

– Introduction of selected performances, research, and current projects

– Presentation of works in progress, recordings, research materials, or initial propositions

– Exchange among participating performers and mentors

– Discussion of interpretative and methodological priorities

– Identification of technical, historical, and conceptual questions

– Initial formulation of sustained inquiries and corresponding artistic development strategies

– Introduction to source, substance, and structure as interdependent fields

– Q&A

 

The purpose of this stage is not to finalize projects, but to establish a rigorous basis for their development. Participants begin to specify what their practices require, which historical or methodological commitments they entail, and how sustained exchange might transform them.

 

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Stage II. | November–December 2026

2 online seminars

 

The second stage advances critical inquiry and practice-led experimentation through SOURCE, SUBSTANCE, AND STRUCTURE: Performance as Historical Knowledge—Genealogies and Futures, the program’s conceptual framework.

 

Artists present performances, recordings, interpretative propositions, rehearsal materials, research documents, experiments, and other pertinent evidence. Participants engage these materials through close listening, analysis, discussion, comparative reflection, and collective methodological inquiry.

 

This stage creates a setting in which artistic questions can be addressed before the on-site residency. Depending on each project’s premises, discussion may concern repertoire, source materials, editions, memory, form, duration, pacing, performance technique, articulation, tuning, temperament, ornamentation, timbre, balance, spatial organization, technologies, coordination, rehearsal methodology, or relations between conceptual propositions and perceptible outcomes.

 

Practice-led inquiry is treated not as the demonstration of stabilized interpretations, but as an analytical encounter among historical materials, embodied technique, sonic perception, ensemble relations, and judgment. Participants critically examine how performances signify, what forms of knowledge and organization they produce, and where ambiguity, resistance, or unforeseen possibilities may become artistically productive.

 

Stage II includes:

– 2 online seminars

– Presentation of developed performances, recordings, and research materials

– Collective listening, analysis, and discussion

– Analysis of sources, materials, and emergent structures

– Examination of interpretative decisions and their consequences

– Technical and methodological critique from performers and mentors

– Critical examination of each project’s artistic and epistemic premises

– Identification of questions requiring testing, rehearsal, or documentation

– Specification of practical and technical requirements

– Development of preliminary presentation and realization strategies

– Preparation for the on-site residency and subsequent festival presentations

– Continued engagement with source, substance, structure, genealogies, and embodied knowledge

– Q&A

 

By the conclusion of Stage II, participants should possess a precise understanding of the artistic, technical, interpretative, and logistical conditions required for the on-site phase. Projects need not be considered fully resolved; they should, however, be sufficiently articulated to enter an intensive process of rehearsal, testing, revision, contextualization, and public realization.

 

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Stage III. | June 2027

On-site residency at the seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week

 

The concluding stage takes place in Bled, Slovenia, during the seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week.

 

During the on-site residency, participating performers enter an intensive environment dedicated to realizing, critically articulating, and publicly presenting their projects. Materials developed through the online stages are brought into rehearsal, discussion, and experimental testing under specific acoustic, spatial, technical, embodied, historical, institutional, and interpersonal conditions that materially shape performance.

 

The on-site phase is not conceived as the execution of decisions settled in advance. Rehearsal remains an active mode of artistic inquiry. Participants may discover that materials require clarification, expansion, reduction, reorganization, or reinterpretation. Encounters among repertoire, research, space, audience, and performance may disclose formal, sonic, technical, methodological, or conceptual possibilities.

 

Participants develop their presentations through performing, listening, discussion, experimentation, and collective decision-making. Peers and mentors offer observations that assist each artist in clarifying relations among their methods, materials, historical positioning, and public formats.

 

Stage III includes:

– On-site residency at the seventh Bled Contemporary Music Week

– Direct critical exchange among performers and mentors

– Artistic development and situated realization of participating artistic projects

– Performance, listening, analysis, and testing

– Focused interpretative rehearsal laboratories

– Interpretative testing and refinement

– Revision where warranted by the artistic research process

– Investigation of acoustic, spatial, technical, and relational conditions

– Preparation for public presentation

– Performances, lecture-performances, interpretative laboratories, and research presentations

 

The public presentations constitute the residency’s culmination while remaining accountable to the processes through which projects developed. They articulate performance, interpretation, rehearsal, research, reflection, and exchange as interdependent dimensions of situated forms of musical knowledge.

 

Where appropriate, the program may include premieres, recontextualized interpretations, experimental formats, or public realizations developed during the residency.