Despite the new stereotype Martinů acquired with Half-Time, the work did have an impact on the “direction particularly prevalent” in his country, as he had remarked in his letter to Talich. For the 1925 ISCM festival, the organizers—due to the success of their festival in 1924—chose Prague once again as the host city for the performance of orchestral music, and Half-Time was even chosen by the society's international delegates as a representative work from Czechoslovakia. The ISCM's Czech delegates, however, who insisted on presenting only “their prominent figures,” put forth Vítězslav Novák's Toman and the Wood Nymph and Rudolf Karel's Sinfonie Demon, both symphonic poems. In the end, the foreign critics in attendance at the festival dismissed the works by Novák and Karel, with Karel's work in particular being reproved for an overdependence on Strauss. Martinů's Half-Time, however, received considerable praise. Also receiving the praise of the foreign critics was Janáček's opera Cunning Little Vixen, which was being performed at the Prague National Theater at that time.

The responses to the 1925 ISCM festival revealed the widening chasm between the conservatism of the Nejedlý School and those seeking to embrace the European avant-garde, for whom Martinů became the principal spokesman. The new discourse surrounding the festival prompted Martinů to write “On Music and Tradition,” in which he takes issue with Czech isolationist tendencies: “At a time the whole world is boiling over with questions, experiments, and the search for new horizons, everything flows like an evening song in our country such that it cannot get any better. We lavish praise on ourselves about how well we have come to terms with things and about how smart we are while the rest of the world is in error.”

The reason for this attitude, he explains, is that the Czech critics are reluctant to abandon the nationalist values that were so heavily ingrained in the population before independence, when music had served as a symbol of resistance. He calls for a de-politicization of music, or an end to the paranoid atmosphere in which “deviations” from tradition can be perceived as national betrayal.