Martin Flašar is an assistant professor at the Department of Musicology, Masaryk University in Brno. Among his specializations belong contemporary music and media, multimedia and electroacoustic music. In 2010 he reached the Ph.D. qualification with the dissertation Le Corbusier, E. Varese, I. Xenakis: Poème électronique (1958). Facts, contexts, interpretations awarded by the First Prize in the Best Master and Doctoral Interdisciplinary Thesis Competition (Olomouc, 2011), later published by Masaryk University and nominated for F. X. Šalda Prize. As an co-author he published several monographies focused on the contemporary audio culture in Central Europe and relations between art and science (for example Sound Exchange : Experimentelle Musikkulturen in Mitteleuropa. Saarbrücken: PFAU Verlag, 2012). He is an ex- member of the Grant commission for classical music of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and a long-term associate of the Czech Radio 3, Czech music journals and newspapers.
Teaching silence: Listening long before music
In 2009, in a review of Hana Adámková Heidrová’s book Music-Ecological Issues and Their Place in Contemporary Music Education, I wrote to Opus musicum that the concept of music education based on listening to “classical” authors and song singing (from folk to popular) is definitely outdated and that an understanding the sounds of our world proves to be a far more ambitious goal than the above- mentioned anachronistic “national revival” project. At that time my idea was criticized by traditional musicology. Today we find ourselves in a situation where it is obvious that Czech music education and musicology should have solved this problem long ago. Therefore, in recent years and decades, projects have emerged that realize that music – although it is a natural human activity – finds itself at the very top of sonic art.