The Multimedia Technologies Applications indd

music, is not viewed as pop music by their pupils! This means that the message of the 
phrase ‘popular music’ has got completely different connotations for pupils than for 
teachers, and that pupils regard as popular music only what is IN right now – played 
on the media and supported by all possible commercial means, without any other 
connections. This foundation uncovers the delusiveness of images of people that 
promote popular music implementation into school music education in which they 
image that a music teacher should be able to grasp the whole realm of popular music 
throughout her/his career, though its range of genres is completely non-transparent 
and extremely unstable, and that the teacher should be able to help pupils fi nd quality 
works in this sphere of music and teach them discern the quality ones from the kit-
sch production, help them fi nd values in this music etc. Maybe a professional DJ is 
capable of capturing the turbulent world of pop music on the local and global level in 
all its functional and genre variations, but the idea that music teachers shall be able to 
master it is not realistic, even if they tried their best (as the research results indicate). 
Moreover, results of a range of studies show that contemporary young people do not 
understand the peculiarity, relative independence and other functional directions of 
both music spheres – artifi cial and non-artifi cial music, and as ensues from the results 
of the presented research, they are not well versed in the world of popular music. 
The matter is what else school music education can do for them when teachers, as 
it seems, fully gave it up and teach in their own way that does not lead anywhere in 
a long term horizon.
Before concluding the results of the presented research, i.e. the meaning of the 
results for music education, especially for individuals that undergo such music edu-
cation, we need to remember some circumstances that may radically infl uence this 
process.
In the recent decades, certain ambivalence has been typical for the music peda-
gogy and education in relation to the surrounding media or virtual world. It needs to 

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USIC
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keep up with the changing social functions of music, it develops in the world abso-
lutely fi lled up with music that is omnipresent and accompanies people everywhere, 
mainly due to the media, and it often serves just as pleasant acoustic atmosphere or 
barrier against the noise of the outer world, and children are ‘educated’ by this kind of 
music information virtually from their birth; this music infl uences them before they 
start school going to school as well as during their school years. Most of the empi-
rical music-sociological studies support this claim and conclude that by saying that 
taste and value attitudes to music, interests and music preferences are formed mainly 
under the infl uence of the media, and in fact, they are in confl ict with the objectives 
and aims of general music education.
It seems to be proven now that previous experience with a certain type of music is 
directly proportional to its accepting and positive or negative evaluation (what a lis-
tener understands is what he/she and usually considers valuable, and, on the contrary, 
what he/she does not understand, does not considered valuable either and is rejected). 
There is an interesting fact: the one who prefers the area of artifi cial music is rather 
able to assess positively some genres of pop music, but, the preferences of non-arti-
fi cial music demonstrate near correlation with a clear disapproval of artifi cial music. 
The rate of auditive experience, being the base for the level of preferences, is in case 
of children and young people extremely higher in the sphere of non-artifi cial music, 
mainly in the contemporary pop music, which logically evokes a higher preferential 
potential of most genres of this sphere (this trend has been repeatedly mentioned in 
music sociological studies since mid last century) (C
RHA
- M
AREK
1989). Moreover, 
at structuring of values and forming of new value orientations, aesthetic values might 
get inversed, when the satisfaction of aesthetic needs of an individual shifts to the 
works of music that function in the popular and entertainment area. This sphere then 
can play a part in the fi lling in of an aesthetic defi cit as a pseudo value, which peace-
fully, without any conscious decoding of the importance of artistic message satisfi es 
the individual aesthetic need as a substitute for real idealistic values, which one can 
never touch via these images (C
RHA
1989).
On the other hand, hi-tech multimedia technologies have opened door to music 
education to earlier unimaginable spheres, mainly in the receptive education, to pro-
vide children and the youth with e.g. regular contact with the works of signifi cant 
composers, with world famous performers, mainly in the area of artifi cial music, that 
all in an excellent audiovisual quality on CD and DVD, using the internet, PC, com-
puter programmes, educational DVDs, composition and notation software etc.
This social situation in which the whole process of general music education evol-
ves at present, was among the motives for the presented research in using of multime-
dia applications in music education, which set this concrete topic into a wider context 
of other related aspects of music education at schools.
Not only prestige of music education in the school context, but also its prestige 
in the society has been a matter discussed for years and one of the cardinal problems 

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EDŘICH
C
RHA
of music education. It gave evidence to the fact that the position of music education 
within the context of other school subjects is subordinate. Teachers feel that mainly 
pupils and parents undervalue this subject, less than their colleagues. Nearly half of 
them have heard an opinion that music education is useless and could be abolished. 
Pupils would replace music lessons for example with Czech, English of Maths, but 
a lesson off instead would suit them best. This only supports the statement that its 
importance is undervalued, especially by parents and the public. Half of respondents 
think that the cause for this opinion is misunderstanding of the message of music 
education, more than a third believe that the opinion is in concord with the prevailing 
orientation of society on the utility value and performance. What ensues from this is 
its low social and fi nancial status of the profession.
Teachers usually formulated the objective of music education as the support of 
general musicality, i.e. relation to music, singing and active music, completed with 
basic literacy in music history and theory, orientation in music genres, connected 
with the tolerance to their variability and possibility of music education to cultivate 
a pupil’s personality. At this place we have to note that it is not the same to formu-
late this goal verbally and to search and fi nd the ways of reaching it (C
RHA
2005a: 
37-46).
The general formulation about the forming of relation to music will now hardly 
survive. In a number of the quoted music sociological studies, there has never been 
a group of people or a single person that would have no relation to music at all, and 
it has not appeared in the presented research either. On the contrary, people of the 
contemporary world feel that the permanent contact with music automatically eleva-
tes them to such values, which music as a kind of art may create. So it is necessary 
to specify this goal: in order to fulfi ll its message, general music education needs to 
educate a person with basic ‘music literacy’, which could become the foundation 
stone and part of his/her positive relation to music – not any kind of music, but to the 
artifi cial music; in other words it is necessary to give children and teenagers auditive 
experience in the sphere of classical music as a basis for understanding other spheres 
of music, and to give back popular music in the recipients’ minds its former, needed 
and benefi cial function which is to entertain, recreate and, at the same time, to get rid 
of its undesirable attribute of a representative of aesthetic values of the whole music 
realm in recipients’ minds (C
RHA
2000: 6-9).
How music education in 2010 manages to meet this objective is refl ected in the 
results of other parts of the research and their interpretation. Regarding using mul-
timedia technologies, there is a signifi cant representation of modern CD and DVD 
players that have replaced gramophones and cassette players in most schools. In 
answers regarding the intensity and means of using computers in music lessons, the 
prevailing function proved to be searching of information and music extracts both 
in the fi le of pupils and teachers, and pupils would welcome more frequent usage 
of computers in lessons as a way to enliven them (and this is what teachers admit as 

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2010
well). There could have been a shift in understanding the question by respondents, 
when, it is not likely that teachers search the information during their lessons, but 
rather when they prepare for them, the same is probably true for searching of music 
extracts. It is hard to imagine how much time that these activities would take in a les-
son, and, mainly, if it had any effect at all. From this perspective, using of computers 
in music lessons is a questionable matter. Using computer software, composition and 
notation software and other multimedia applications was statistically minimal, positi-
ve was the openness of teachers to be educated in this area. The interactive board was 
quite positively accepted by the respondents; it is most frequently used in lessons and 
is seen by the larger half of teachers as a means of making lessons more entertaining 
and raising effi ciency.
There was a signifi cant concord between pupils and teachers in the judgment 
of the proportionality of individual activities within one lesson. Pupils like singing 
most, and in concord with teachers, they say that the time they devote to it in a les-
son together with other activities (playing musical instruments, musical movement) 
is from 20 to 30 minutes. All teachers believe that music education should cover 
both folk songs and modern pop songs, which means that the rate is balanced. The-
oretical lecturing lasts 10-15 minutes on average, and there is not much time left 
for listening activities, which take from 0-5 minutes according to pupils and from 
5-10 minutes as teachers say, but the reality is rather on the lower edge of the inter-
vals. Listening to classical and popular music is balanced, including pupils papers. 
The activity approach clearly prevails in music lessons at primary schools, and the 
active participation of pupils is welcome. If we take into account that a school year 
lasts approx. 40 weeks, and there is one music lesson a week, in which listening acti-
vities last 5 minutes which is time equally divided between the classical and modern 
pop music, then it is not diffi cult to calculate that the ‘real’ receptive education in the 
whole school year lasts approx. 100 minutes, i.e. less than 2 hours, and only about 
400 minutes, which is less than 7 hours of all the time pupils spend at school at the 
second stage of primary education!!!
We can conclude it by saying that music education on the second stage of ele-