The New Symposium
Portfolio Dialogues
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COMPOSER PORTFOLIOS IN DIALOGUE
Upcoming Composer Portfolio Dialogue: to be announced soon
The New Symposium begins with a premise: a composer’s portfolio is not merely a retrospective record. It is an active form of the practice itself—a site where its assumptions, methods, and unrealized possibilities can be reconstructed, questioned, and thought anew.
Each edition brings a distinguished composer in classical or contemporary music into sustained dialogue with a selected group of young and emerging composers. Completed works and projects still taking shape occupy the same field of attention, allowing retrospective reflection and present-tense invention to inform one another.
The discussion proceeds through scores, recordings, sketches, instruments, software, working procedures, and conditions of production. These are treated not as supplementary illustrations, but as primary materials of inquiry. They reveal how ideas enter material, how material redirects method, and how form emerges from the interaction of aesthetic intention, material behavior, technical constraint, and production context.
Viewed across time, a portfolio seldom supports a simple developmental narrative. A procedure devised for one work returns under altered conditions; a formal solution hardens into a problem; a technical limitation acquires aesthetic necessity; an unanswered question becomes the premise of another work. Read relationally rather than chronologically, the portfolio becomes a structure of propositions, revisions, and consequences through which a practice redefines its own terms.
The inquiry triangulates three registers: the composer’s account, the procedures through which the music was made, and the formal and perceptual consequences of the resulting work. Convergence makes the relation between intention and realization legible; divergence reveals where the work exceeds authorial explanation.
The participation of young and emerging composers is constitutive of the format. Their practices, still in formation, introduce questions that may remain unavailable within an established method. In return, sustained engagement with a body of work developed over time provides methodological perspective, historical depth, and resistance against which their own ideas can gain definition. Artistic knowledge does not pass intact from one generation to another; it is altered through comparison, challenge, and revision.
Moderated by Brina Kren, The New Symposium returns the portfolio to a state of potential. Completed works are reopened as propositions, while projects in formation become thinkable in public. The encounter asks not only what a body of work has achieved, but what remains active within it—and what music it may yet make possible.
UPCOMING PORTFOLIO DIALOGUES
PAST PORTFOLIO DIALOGUES
COMPOSER PORTFOLIOS IN DIALOGUE
PERFORMER PORTFOLIOS IN DIALOGUE
APPLICATION FORM TO PARTICIPATE:
The New Symposium 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