All the powers of Europe became involved in the war, which had political consequences and produced cultural changes on several continents. In the Latin area, the musics, dances and instrumental groups underwent a notable transformation during the years of the conflict. Some musics in particular became widespread and predominant, reaching all the countries of Western Europe. Other musics, in contrast, which had been specific to certain areas or countries alone, fell into the shadow of the pervasive new tastes, becoming "minorized" and relegated to village songs and dances, that is to say, what we now call traditional music.
Through songs, the Catalans kept alive for generations the painful memory of the war and of the loss of their freedoms. The songs about Bac de Roda, the Miquelets or the Duke of Marlborough were preserved through time in the memory of the people and later the activists of the Renaixença or Catalan Rebirth movement collected and documented them with passion. Since that time, the legend of 1714 has been musically re-created by generations of composers, leading to the formation, in the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, of a corpus of evocative socially-committed music which, viewed as a whole, now forms the subject of an exhibition for the first time ever.