The Impact of World Wars on Culture: Evidence from Classical Music Performances

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Abstract

Do types of political regimes matter to states’ tolerance toward foreign culture during war? Despite their heralded values of liberty and diversity, it has been historically documented that democratic countries often engage in strict control of cultural influence emanating from their enemies. The evidence thus far accumulated in the previous research, however, remains anecdotal and is not accompanied with a quantitatively comparable assessment of the varying cultural tolerance across countries over time. In this paper, I investigate the pattern of classical music performances before, during, and after the two great wars, based on the original dataset assembled from concert program notes of nine worldly renowned symphony orchestras chosen from five countries (Austria, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States). Descriptive statistics, regression analysis, and Bayesian change-point analysis altogether suggest that the great wars diminished the performances of music pieces originating from enemy countries in wartime regardless of regime types and further that the outcome of wars significantly affected the degree and speed with which cultural tolerance was restored in the postwar eras. These findings seem indicative of the world reality, echoing the claim of the realist tradition in the literature of international relations, that the states’ interest and relative power dictate patterns of international transactions, including the flow of culture across sovereign state borders.

Author

• Masanori Kikuchi, Waseda University