Folk song and instrumental music form an organic part of Czech national culture. It has become part of the musical educational efforts that have been applied in Czech schools especially since the last decades of the 19th century. The function of musical and folk heritage, especially in school music education, has changed over the course of more than a century; it has always reflected to some extent the cultural and historical changes in society.
Today, the folk song genre still forms an important didactic background.
It passes through music education at primary, partly also secondary schools and specialized instrumental or vocal education at primary art schools. In view of contemporary multifaceted cultural expressions and the influence of multimedia, we are often faced with the question of how to present the musically folklore heritage to school children. Research on the application of folk music in schools is lacking in the Czech environment. There are only findings of field researches of ethnomusicological nature, which were rather focused on the consequences of school education in the area under study (M. Toncrová, V. Frolcová-Šepláková, J. Kučerová, M. Šilhavíková, etc.). They clearly testify to the importance of teachers' professional erudition and application skills; the results indicated a very fluctuating character in the acceptance of folk tradition by young people.
The future Czech teachers get acquainted with the ways of applying musical folklore in teaching mainly in music didactic courses, they work with folklore material in practical music courses, and exceptionally in ethnomusicological seminars at some Faculties of Education. A research investigation oriented towards the nature and level of music-folklore application in teaching, which is the current focus of the Department of Music Education, should help music pedagogical practice. The outcome of the specific research will be to capture the current state of the integration of the music and folklore strand into the curriculum and to propose optimization solutions.

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