Official Webpage

The starting point of the European research project “Schools@Concerts” is quiet simple: Schools cooperate with concert hosts to give pupils the possibility to attend classical concerts. Such music education outreach projects take place all over Europe in a variety of forms. This plurality of individual cases is the nucleus of this research project, where data from ten different European cooperation projects are compared.

The Schools@Concerts project takes the perspective of music education. The main goal of the Schools@Concerts research project is to collect cooperation projects from different European countries and do an indepth analysis of the organizational structure. Within the selected and analyzed cooperation projects, different groups of people work together to implement this kind of cooperation. Concert hosts, music teachers and pupils have their own expectations, opinions and goals. These different perspectives on the cooperation projects are collected and will be compared.

The research project investigate the following main topics:

Goals, expectations and roles of the persons involved (pupils, music teacher, concert host);
Preparation process and follow up activities within the cooperation project;
Pupils’ experiences in connection to the concert attendance.
The data was collected by interviews and questionnaires on a pre-post setup using validated constructs (musical self concept, STOMP) as well as open questions. There were 2 steps: collection of data before the concert and after the concert. Before the concert an interview with the teacher was conducted as well as with the key person of the concert host, and a questionnaire given to the pupils, and after the concert interviews were made with the pupils’ group and with the teacher about their impressions and thoughts concerning the cooperation project.

The selection criteria for the individual cooperation projects are as follows. We selected projects which: are a cooperation between a single school and a concert host; have a tradition of minimum 5 years; give one music class (age 10 to 15) the opportunity to attend a classical evening concert; include any kind of preparation for the pupils before the concert and/or follow-up activities after the concert attendance.