The Multimedia Technologies Applications indd

Music Education 2010
Bedřich Crha
The international music education conference Music viva in schola, with nearly 
a fi fty-year tradition, which is rooted in the context of the Czech and European music 
education, has always been a platform for thematisation and presentation of relevant 
issue groups of music pedagogy as a science on the level of theoretical refl ections, 
but also a platform for topical issues of the life music educational process on all types 
and stages of school education, where this general, but also selectively specialized 
or professional music education is performed. The conferences have been a meeting 
place for our music pedagogues with specialists from a range of other European 
countries and an opportunity of exchanging experience in all fi elds of music pedago-
gy studies as well as in the process of teaching music. This has been refl ected in the 
main themes of the conferences, that, though always from another angle, have always 
implicitly concerned the cardinal problems connected with the main goal and mission 
of music education, i.e. passing of music from generation to generation, and educa-
tion of a qualifi ed music listener: “Current problems of music education”, “Music 
teacher in the European context”, “Preparation of music teachers at faculties of 
education in the Czech Republic”, “New dimension of musicality as an issue in music 
education”, “Diffi culties in the receptive education in the context of the contempora-
ry music education”, “Does music educate a man?”, “Art and present mass media 
world – symbiosis or confrontation?”, “Human – art – culture”, the latest conference 
in 2008 devoted to the theme of “Problems of reception in different arts”, and fi nally, 
this year’s topic is “Using multimedia technologies in music education”.
What ensues from the thematic groups listed above, is that the matters of status 
and functions of music and music education in the globalisation process and conti-
nuously rising intensity of mass media or virtual world infl uence, that is standing 
between a man and his real world, evoke in contemporary music pedagogy, as a the-
oretical refl ection of the whole music educational process with the anticipation ambi-
tions, the need to search for new ways of providing young people with knowledge, 
abilities, basic music literacy and reception competency for their further taste and 
value orientation in the fl ood of music information that directs to them.
However, 
there has been a similar tendency in music pedagogy and music education for more 
than a hundred years, a period that could be described as a fi ght for the change of the 
status and functions, improving quality and social emancipation of music education. 
It is understandable that all studies of music education in schools, especially in the 
receptive activities, ensue from the assumption that the whole process of education is 
closely tied to and conditioned by the possibility of contacting a student with music. 
These possibilities have changed incredibly in the course of time, and it could make 

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B
EDŘICH
C
RHA
an impression that the development and popularization of the radio at fi rst, other 
recording and reproduction technologies later and new multimedia technologies at 
present have formed a new, earlier unimaginable room for the realization of school 
music educational goals. But, there has been a certain paradox: this room that has 
not been used in education for various organizational, technical, economic, person-
nel or other social reasons, it has been generally fi lled with the media, and because 
of that a gap between the objectives of music education and music experience of 
pupils along with their music preferences has been deepening. Shall music pedagogy 
be a meaningful and functional means of meeting the objectives of complete music 
education, it can’t do without music-sociological information on music activities, 
interests and attitudes to individual genres of both artifi cial and non-artifi cial music 
that demonstrate strong correlations with music preferences.
In our country, there has been a long tradition of efforts to picture various atti-
tudes to music, music interests, activities, popularity of different styles and genres of 
music, types of listener behaviour, music taste, music preferences and musicality as 
a phenomenon. The introduction of a phonotest connected with Otakar Zich (1910) 
was a signifi cant contribution to the empirical music research. It was later used in 
the studies of František Lýsek (1956; 1963) and also in one of fundamental studies, 
greatly received not only in this country but also internationally, which is the research 
into the contemporary musicality by authors V. Karbusický and J. Kasan (1964; 
1969). Other researches were carried out under the auspices of the Institute for the 
Signifi cance of Culture (H
EPNER
1973; C
EJP
- M
AŘÍKOVÁ
1978) and the Study Depart-
ment of the Czechoslovak Radio that also were in charge of one of the most important 
studies of the 1990s, The Research into Musicality by Jaroslav Kasan (1991) in 1990. 
The latest representative study of listeners in the Czech Republic was elaborated by 
Mikuláš Bek (2003) in 2001. There is one common thing for all these as well as other 
empirical studies, no matter what aspect of social existence of music and listener be-
haviour they study: the question of the effi ciency of music education has always been 
implicitly present, since the sampling fi les and their units had one common social 
sign – they concerned “graduates” of the general music education at primary schools, 
and all results, especially the ones regarding attitudes to music and preferences of 
different music styles and genres refer to the outcome of this education. The most 
critical conclusion was made in the quoted Kasan’s research from 1990 where, in 
relation to the preferences of the youth, he claims that ... music education has hardly 
any effect. Other conclusions that might be generalized show that the relatively new 
and variable music education closely tied to hi-tech multimedia technologies, stands 
against the goals of music education and to a certain extent negates its attempts to 
cultivate music taste, music preferences and attitudes of children and youth, espe-
cially to artifi cial music, to such an extent that in connection with music education, 
we could rather speak of so called ‘re-education’ (K
ASAN
1991).

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M
USIC
E
DUCATION
2010
Yet, there is no evidence of any study whose goal and objective would be the study 
the present state of music education at primary schools, i.e. general music education 
for the whole generation and the goal of which was greatly formulated by Vladimír 
Helfert more than eighty years ago: ... the goal of systematic receptive education is to 
cultivate the unconscious receptive musicality into the conscious form in such a way 
that the need for less valuable music would be suppressed by the need for precious 
and cultivated music, i.e. music culture of listeners would be elevated, school music 
education would educate and cultivate music taste (H
ELFERT
1956).
If no representative empirical sociological music research of the state of music 
education at primary schools was carried out in the post-war history of Czechoslo-
vakia and the Czech Republic, the ambition of the research presented here, named 
‘The Research into Using Multimedia Technologies in Music Education’ which is the 
theme of the following text, was to fi ll this gap and, at the same time, to accentuate 
the most topical matters of possibilities of using multimedia for the support of the 
music educational process at primary schools. Some of the interactive multimedia 
is used daily by both pupils and teachers, who can work with them and benefi t from 
them (the Internet, CD, DVD etc.). The question is whether this is a reality also in the 
music education process at primary schools.
The objective of the proposed research was to map and interpret (with the use of 
the questionnaire method) the extent of using multimedia from the point of view of 
pupils and teachers, and to propose more ways of using multimedia on the basis of 
the results of the research, if possible. It is to be understood that this relatively narrow 
and specifi c problem group cannot be taken out of the context of all the other factors 
in the complete process of general music education at primary schools, and that is 
why the research was projected in a wider extent so that it could capture the present