Shay Loya Liszts Transcultural Modernism PDF
Shay Loya Liszts Transcultural Modernism PDF
MARJORIE HIRSCH
In this ambitious book Shay Loya sets out to reconsider, from the ground up,
Liszt’s relationship to the Hungarian-gypsy musical tradition, a tradition many
listeners encounter primarily through Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies. The rela-
tionship began in Liszt’s rural-Hungarian childhood, when he worked up a
pair of gypsy dances in brilliant style for the piano. It came to a climax with the
Hungarian Rhapsodies of the early 1850s and their accompanying book Des
Bohémiens et de leur musique en Hongrie (1859), and it found a more abstract,
sublimated outlet in the experimental, harmonically distended late pieces.
Liszt’s long-term engagement with the Hungarian-gypsy tradition, called
“verbunkos” in this book for economy, has all the disjunctions and contradic-
tions of his colorful career, and Loya confronts these complexities with im-
pressive erudition and sharp insights.
Loya’s central argument is that Liszt’s engagement with verbunkos music is
essentially “modernist” and “transcultural.” It is modernist in its drive, largely
subconscious, to expand the boundaries of composition with new, unfamiliar
sounds, and it is transcultural in its openness to systemic transformation by the
culturally foreign musical practices of the gypsies. These arguments revise two
influential lines of opinion about Liszt’s verbunkos-related pieces: first, the
viewpoint, expressed most forcefully by Bartók, that verbunkos was an inau-
thentic, trivial corruption of folk sources, which extracted from those sources
all potential for progressive composition; and second, the viewpoint that
Liszt’s gypsy pieces are classic examples of exoticism, in which all traces of oth-
erness are quashed or contained by Western frames. Loya wants to rehabilitate
Liszt as a modernist, specifically a Bartók-like modernist who makes it new by
fusing the practices of the verbunkos idiom with the already progressive com-
positional practices of the New German School, and then developing a still
more personal, idiosyncratic idiom in the late works.
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Loya does not deny that Liszt’s book Des Bohémiens invested the
Hungarian Rhapsodies with an aura of romantic exoticism that was attractive
to readers of the time. But he argues this should not obscure the composi-
tional practice itself, and he relies heavily on music analysis of a formal sort to
justify his argument for Liszt’s transcultural modernism. In the more politi-
cally charged musicology of the 1990s, studies of exoticism underlined the
broader processes of control, imperialism, and colonial domination that un-
derpinned European representations of cultural others. These critiques com-
monly observed that exoticist representations necessarily evoke a resisting
agency that needs reining in if the dominant organization of social power is to
be maintained. The cultural other evoked in a piece of music or art might,
through some fluke or malfunction in the apparatus of representation, break
through and infiltrate the very subject that is supposed to be producing and
controlling it. Loya’s argument is that Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, unlike
most exoticisms in nineteenth-century music, break down the self–other bi-
nary in this way, and that Liszt took the consequences even further in his later
music. Liszt lets the foreignness of Roma music shape his musical thinking.
He goes with it, allowing himself to be guided along musical paths to the
point where he violates, or at least revises, the basic formal, phraseological, and
harmonic principles of the compositional tradition in which he was trained. If
only subconsciously, Liszt breaks the frames that are supposed to ensure the
enclosure of the other.
The seven chapters of the book follow Liszt’s verbunkos odyssey in an ap-
proximately chronological manner. The introduction and first chapter explain
the book’s leading rubric, “transcultural modernism.” “Modernism” here
means post-1848 progressive music in general, a usage that takes some time to
assimilate. In backdating modernism, Loya mainly wants to clear a space for
the inclusion of verbunkos music, which was unjustly expelled by severe com-
posers and scholars of the twentieth century. The term “transcultural” or
“transculturation” is borrowed from “South American postcolonial dis-
course” (p. 5). Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz coined it to characterize a
mode of cultural exchange that, unlike “acculturation” or “deculturation,”
does not entail the absorption of one culture by another, but develops those
cultures synthetically: “endless and nonhierarchic interconnections between
cultures that are, through these interrelations, in an endless process of merger
and internal change” (p. 6). Such processes may sound distant from the uni-
verse of middle-class music making in nineteenth-century Europe, but Loya
warns against historical condescension: “The idea that nineteenth-century
composers were exoticists or fantasy folklorists with no real knowledge of the
music they were supposedly borrowing is not completely wrong, but it is not
completely right, either” (p. 24). Loya reminds us several times that Liszt
heard live gypsy bands, and he could not have written the Hungarian
Rhapsodies the way he did without the specific aural knowledge gained from
these live performances, for the Rhapsodies incorporate harmonies, sonorities,
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use of the modal theory of chapter 5, the thematic threads holding the analy-
ses together are weak. Chapter 7, which concerns Liszt’s curious and some-
times cryptic late works, opens with a long-overdue discussion of Liszt and
lateness. The abstractness of these works was valorized by post-1945 analysts
as forward-looking or progressive. In the framework of “lateness,” however,
the abstractness reads as detached and retrospective, and this detachment, ac-
cording to Loya, fed Liszt’s modernism by allowing him to treat the verbunkos
idiom in a highly experimental spirit. Loya tags a number of passages illumi-
nating the influence of verbunkos rhythm, melody, and texture, but the focus
here is again on highly intricate formal and harmonic constellations.
The term “transculturation” is an attractive one, suggesting flexibility, re-
laxed boundaries, openness to others, dialogic exchange, and mutual accom-
modation. Loya hints at these values in his preface when he proposes that “a
transcultural and transnational reading of the verbunkos idiom is more sensitive
to the artistic and spiritual world that Liszt truly inhabited, in which love of a
country and of a local culture did not mean subscribing to one overriding
identity at the expense of all others” (p. xi). This statement may hold true for
Liszt himself, but can it hold for “the artistic and spiritual world Liszt inhab-
ited”? The controversy around Liszt’s gypsy book suggests that at least some
people in the world around him were far less open than he was. Loya himself
claims that the discursive habits and limits of Liszt’s contemporary world
made it nearly impossible to validate Liszt’s transcultural modernism, leaving
it for retrospective scholarship to recognize and affirm. The limitations of the
term transculturation become clearer when we consider how little Liszt and
his associates were influenced by the gypsies in nonmusical ways. An argument
for transculturation would surely be much stronger if the kinds of influence
Loya demonstrates for Roma music had any parallels in dance, folklore, social
life, ethical attitudes, or the sphere of law and rights—that is, in any other
streams of culture. The limitations of transculturalism are also clear in the lack
of mutual influence. The possibility that Roma musicians might have “taken
something back” from Liszt, and thus reversed the direction of influence, is
not even entertained, presumably because it seems highly unlikely. A similar
trace of idealization is found in the notion of “transculturation from below,”
which sounds more friendly and less dominant than “transculturation from
above” (p. 162), the latter associated with Bartók. Whether from above or
from below, Loya evaluates transcultural processes exclusively for how they
benefit “Western” composers, who seem to be the only agents in the story.
Liszt’s way with verbunkos lacks the two-way “endless process of merger and
internal change” (p. 6) that Loya attributes to transcultural processes. The de-
tailed analyses ultimately reveal a hybridization of harmonic systems rather
than transcultural process in any broader sense.
There is a noticeable difference between the book’s music-analytical argu-
ment and its cultural argument. The music analysis is executed with maximal
explicitness and systematic rigor, while the argument for transculturality is
576 Journal of the American Musicological Society
made in an almost casual manner, with little close investigation of the actual
cultures in which Liszt’s music and gypsy music circulated. This raises the tired
old question of the compatibility of music analysis and cultural history. Loya’s
ambition to bridge the gap and synthesize disparate bodies of knowledge is
impressive. He has assimilated a large bibliography and brings an uncommon
range of perspectives—biographical, historical, stylistic, hermeneutic, cultural,
historiographic, and analytical—to bear on the subject. The music analysis
alone shows his command of many branches of theory: modal, tonal,
Schenkerian, neo-Riemannian, and pitch-class-set analysis all make appear-
ances. The disciplinary synthesis Loya strives for seems to be within reach for
the first three chapters, but starting with the end of chapter 4 the balance shifts
decisively toward pitch-centered analysis. The Western harmonic system, and
its inflection by non-Western modes, emerges as the core matter of the book,
eclipsing even other aspects of musical style. And because this analysis tends
toward the hermetic, it seems to be a thin hinge on which to hang the argu-
ment for transculturation. The book’s compendious coverage will nonetheless
make it an indispensable resource for future students of verbunkos and its rela-
tionship to Western compositional practice. It greatly expands our awareness
of the Hungarian-gypsy topoi in Liszt’s compositional oeuvre, not just at the
surface level but also at more integrated, submerged levels. It complements re-
cent studies by Lynn Hooker, David Schneider, and Rachel Beckles Willson,
in which fraught questions of music and Hungarian national identity have
been reevaluated from postnational and post-thaw perspectives. It effectively
dismantles the condescending attitudes that long surrounded the verbunkos
style, and arouses fresh admiration for the ingenuity and bold originality of
Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, which were dismissed as trivial or second-rate
works by writers as diverse as Hanslick, Bartók, and Charles Rosen.
DANA GOOLEY
Schoenberg’s New World: The American Years, by Sabine Feisst. Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. xvii, 379 pp.