The cultural study of music provides an interdisciplinary starting point for the exploration of contemporary musical culture as part of the long history of modernity and its alternatives. Through this approach, we seek to understand the cultural meanings of music, its practices and discourses in a variety of historical, political, social and cultural contexts and from a variety of theoretical perspectives. We critically define ourselves against the historically constructed and ethnocentric notion of the aesthetic autonomy of the arts, and instead seek to study music and its meanings as an integral part of social and cultural processes. In our conception, cultural music studies understands music and writing about it as a situated cultural practice in the first place and therefore always emphasizes the importance of studying particular positions and perspectives (including reflection on one’s own). Our aim is to understand what various musical practices, cultural objects and talk about them mean and do in a particular culture and society.

Through this approach, we seek to integrate and further develop musicological research traditions with until recently separate history (and in some places still separate presence), especially the so-called new musicology, ethnomusicology and popular music studies. Methodologically, we employ both widely shared interdisciplinary qualitative research methods such as fieldwork, as well as historical or oral history methods, close reading of texts, and discursive analysis. We seek to apply the critical tradition of thought that developed in the humanities in the second half of the 20th century, especially in the context of the so-called linguistic and cultural turn. The starting points of our thought are therefore more general theoretical texts, for example, from the fields of feminist or postcolonial criticism, cultural studies, cultural analysis, philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, and others.

Tereza Havelková‘s cultural analysis focuses on musical theatre and other multimedia art forms of the 20th and 21st centuries. Vít Zdrálek applies an ethnographic approach to the study of South African popular music and religious culture and an oral history method to the study of the so-called folklore movement in Czechoslovakia.

The teaching platform is primarily the Seminar in Cultural Analysis of Music, which we co-lead, and the courses that lead up to it during the course of the degree, in particular Introduction to Ethnomusicology, Cultural and Ethnographic Studies in Music, and the Seminar in Contemporary Music Culture, as well as other elective courses.