On October 28, 1918, a monumental change took place that altered the course of Czech society for the succeeding two decades: an assembly of figures from Czech political life gathered and issued a proclamation of independence, thereby ending 298 years of Austrian political and cultural domination. A new Republic was born that included not only a union of Czechs and Slovaks (for the first time in their history, creating borders that had never before existed), but also new minority populations of German, Hungarian, Polish, and Rusyn citizens, with which the new government and society had to contend. Almost overnight, attitudes changed in Prague's Czech-speaking musical community regarding cultural interaction, from perceived isolation to openness, from marginalization to domination, while for the long-standing German community these changes happened exactly in reverse, occasionally with disturbing and violent consequences. Although for the Czechs the era started with an overwhelming sense of optimism, by the mid-1920s this exuberance had sharply abated, prompted largely by fears of the modern, cosmopolitan world they had rushed to embrace. Conversely, for the German-Bohemians, the initial anguish of dispossession gave way gradually to a new, if limited, cooperative spirit, particularly with other German cultural centers.

Musically the new era paralleled these social developments, in that a new openness to modernism and foreign influences in 1918 was soon replaced by an anxiety over the potential loss of Czech national difference and tradition.