It is argued that a historically informed approach to the study of Oceania facilitates the understanding of how Oceanian and European cultures were both respectively and mutually shaped by centuries of cross-cultural contact and exchange. Recent scholarship on Oceania's networks of knowledge and culture obviates the need to reconstruct forgotten forms of musical practice or trace strands of musical dissemination and appropriation. Encounter music marked a new aural occurrence in the soundscapes of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century voyagers and islanders, and it impacted the social relations and power dynamics of the transacting parties. Music and dance constituted an important aspect of Oceanian voyaging: sea songs, fiddle tunes, and hornpipes provided exercise and recreation for European sailors and officers during long passages at sea. Western assumptions about the social and public character of music are confounded by notions of ownership, restricted audience, and secrecy prevalent in parts of Oceania.

Russian culture in the first two decades of the twentieth century came under influences that could be found in most European cultures. Russian culture was influenced by circumstances distinct from other cultures. The first was the intelligentsia, a self-defined class of educated people who sustained social and cultural life under the profoundly undemocratic conditions of tsarism. The second was the October Revolution, which separated Russia from European cultures after 1917, and fundamentally reconfigured the cultural life of the country. Moderate policies ensured that many modes of cultural expression received state support. In practice the Bolsheviks accepted the same cultural hierarchies that radical Leftists would make the primary target of October Revolution. Soviet culture suffered from a deep split between artists, administrators and audiences. Russian-Soviet culture was fundamentally different after fifty years of social and institutional change. An institutional framework based on the autocracy had given way to private and informal institutions, which were then swept away by the October Revolution.