In the first decades, the analysis of the post-1989 changes in Central Europe was almost only led by political scientists.* Historians did not feel entitled to investigate an event that was so recent. In fact, many felt they could not even study the communist period as a whole; as the director of the Czech Interior Ministry archives told me in 2002, historians should wait for at least fifty years until the “passions settled down.” Political science filled the gap and the now almost forgotten path dependency theory shaped generations of scholars who endeavoured to account for the post-1989 developments on the sole basis of the 1989 changes, rarely if ever mentioning the communist period.

The history of music in the 20th century is characterized by the global transfer and exchange of artistic concepts, models and techniques. An important catalyst for these processes of cultural transfer was the phenomenon of emigration (often involuntary, such as by artists persecuted by totalitarian regimes).