Members of the Department of Music History staff are authors, co-authors or editors of numerous further publications, including books, magazine articles and sheet music, both in Czech and in major international languages. Some of them have likewise been systematically engaged as higher education teachers, acting as lecturers, and as supervisors and opponents of B.A., M.A. and PhD. theses at various education institutions, including Charles University in Prague (Faculties of  Arts,  Education, and Catholic Theology), the Týn  School (Collegium Marianum) in Prague, etc. Others have worked regularly with a wide spectrum of public institutions, such as the National Museum – Czech Museum of Music, the National Library of the Czech Republic, or the National Theatre in Prague, making sophisticated music culture accessible to the general public through public lectures and radio broadcasts, dramaturgical participation in conceiving various exhibitions, concert programmes and music festivals, as well as through their own contribution as active performing musicians. Likewise of note is the extent of their international co-operation with, apart from colleagues at the Institute of Musicology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, also scholars in the Department´s partner institutions in Vienna, Budapest, Ljubljana, Belgrade, Mainz (in particular, the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur), Leipzig and Tübingen, as well as other institutions, in Italy, France, the United Kingdom, and overseas.

Incorporated as part of the Department of Music History is the editorial board of an internationally respected quarterly, Hudební věda [Musicology], a periodical serving as a platform for texts by Czech and international scholars, whose publication is financed largely from the institutional budget of the Institute of Ethnology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. Another of the Department´s activities reaching beyond its home framework, generating a nationwide and international impact, has been the regular practice of drawing up annual national bibliographies followed up by sending the resulting bibliographical data out to the worldwide database of musicological publications, RILM (Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale, www.rilm.org). The Department of Music History of the Institute of Ethnology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, currently also serves as the headquarters of the Czech Society for Musicology, member of the Council of Scientific Societies in the Czech Republic.

The library of the Department of Music History, with its approx. 35,000 library units, ranks among the foremost specialist libraries in the Czech Republic. Its premises are currently going through the second stage of a major reconstruction. Upon its completion in late 2009, it could (re)open to the broad scholarly and musical public, offering among other things room for conferences, seminars, thematic exhibitions, and chamber-music concerts.

Since its inception, the work of the Department of Music History has been purposefully based upon the principle of co-ordination and co-operation between its individual members and research teams. Any research in the field of music history would be virtually inconceivable without drawing on results of research carried out in related scholarly fields grouped within the Academy of Sciences: namely, history, art history, ethnology, linguistics, literary history, aesthetics, philosophy, and others.

We believe that music history – like other scholarly disciplines harboured within the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic – can contribute significantly in shaping the cultural standard of contemporary Czech society, as well as projecting its share of influence into the quality of life of future generations. Therefore, we add our voices to the canon of protest at the policies pursued by the present government of this country and its advisory bodies, geared towards drastic cuts in the funding of basic research in the Czech Republic, afflicting most painfully the area of its highest concentration that is the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and its individual institutes.