570 Journal of the American Musicological Society

by each composer. Despite a certain compromise in comprehensiveness and

coherence, this is a deeply insightful book and a rewarding read. On several
occasions, Muxfeldt draws intriguing analogies between techniques of music
and film (e.g., the blurring of sounds or images just before a flashback). One
might draw a similar analogy to summarize her achievement. By scouring the
various arts, political, intellectual, and social history, biography, and even mod-
ern science for evidence about music’s mechanisms of communication,
Muxfeldt introduces Technicolor to the subject of musical meaning, wonder-
fully illuminating the hazy landscape of hermeneutic studies.

MARJORIE HIRSCH

Liszt’s Transcultural Modernism and the Hungarian-Gypsy Tradition, by Shay

Loya. Eastman Studies in Music 87. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester
Press, 2011. xviii, 341 pp.

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.
 Reviews 571

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,
572 Journal of the American Musicological Society

and practices found nowhere in the published verbunkos pieces available to

Liszt. The Rhapsodies fuse streams of written and oral cultures, and in this
sense they are a product of true transculturation. Specifically, they represent
transculturation “from below,” where the written tradition evolves in direct
response to verbunkos practice, rather than transculturation “from above,” in
which folk material is abstracted and subjected to modernist compositional
techniques already in place (Bartók, Stravinsky, etc.). Such transculturation is
“modernist” insofar as it introduces novel sounds and practices into the writ-
ten tradition and opens up new horizons for composition. “Transcultural
modernism,” then, is progressive music whose forward impetus derives from
responsive contact with other musical practices and traditions, rather than
from, say, a philosophical idea, a diagnosis of the trajectory of history, or a will
to make it new.
Chapter 2 offers a concise history of the verbunkos idiom, “a transcultural
phenomenon par excellence” (p. 61), starting in the later eighteenth century
when village practices started to infiltrate “Western” compositional practice
and emerged as an identifiable topos within galant-style instrumental composi-
tions and ballroom dances. In the early nineteenth century there emerged a
more independent tradition of written-out composition, closer to its unwrit-
ten sources, which Loya calls “authorial verbunkos.” These pieces are offered
as context for Liszt’s early, unpublished short fantasies on two gypsy dances.
An analysis of these pieces leads to the conclusion that Liszt, as early as 1828,
is already thinking like a modernist: “His interest in the characteristic is not
motivated by preservation or authenticity per se but by the expressive and cre-
ative possibilities of verbunkos” (p. 85).
Chapter 3 concentrates on Liszt’s Hungarian compositions of the 1840s,
the period when he began to develop a strong connection to his country of
birth. Loya contextualizes these pieces within the burgeoning Hungarian na-
tionalist movement and astutely traces the complex relationships between folk
music, national music, and national identity. Liszt’s Hungarian projects of the
1840s are quite miscellaneous, including heroic marches, arrangements of
gentry songs (Magyar nóta), a Hungarian cantata, and a projected Hungarian
symphony. But the project that grips him most, the series of Hungarian
Rhapsodies, first crystallizes in the late 1840s after he hears live gypsy music
and imagines this music as a national epic in tones. Throughout this chapter
Loya stresses Liszt’s relative disregard for narrow or dogmatic delimitations of
national identity. But when Liszt argued, in his book Des Bohémiens, that
gypsy music was the most significant and most deeply Hungarian music, he
provoked virulent opposition from many Hungarian compatriots. Loya’s ac-
count of this controversy is extremely valuable and provides a long-needed
balance to the more defensive accounts of Klara Hamburger.1
1. Klára Hamburger, “Understanding the Hungarian Reception History of Liszt’s Des
Bohémiens et de leur musique en Hongrie (1859/1881),” Journal of the American Liszt Society
54–56 (2003–5): 75–84.
 Reviews 573

Chapter 4, “Modernism and Authenticity,” lies appropriately at the center

of the book, for it synthesizes all of the main threads: the critique of Bartók’s
position on Liszt, the reclamation of verbunkos as an authentically modernist
practice, the progressive nature of Liszt’s engagement with verbunkos, and
deep musical analysis. One valuable aspect of this chapter is its in-depth pre-
sentation of twentieth-century Hungarian scholarship on Liszt. In the mid-
century writings of Zoltán Gárdonyi, Loya finds a natural ally, for Gárdonyi
was likewise trying to reverse Bartók’s dismissal of Liszt’s Hungarian music:
“[Gárdonyi’s] interpretation positioned Liszt as a pre-Bartókian (or pre-
Kodályian) composer, whose artistic journey from realistic imitation to per-
sonalized abstraction set a fruitful example for the future Hungarian school”
(p. 133). Loya also gives considerable attention to the studies of Lajos Bárdos,
who studied Liszt’s use of alternative scales, and discovered much more flexi-
bility and variety than one normally finds in the nineteenth century pieces
using the Gypsy-minor scale (minor-third, raised fourth, lowered sixth, raised
seventh). Loya is reclaiming and building on the analytical and theoretical
work of these scholars, which “pointed in the right direction, but eventually
led to a discursive cul-de-sac and concluded prematurely in the 1970s” (pp. 4,
117).
The degree to which music analysis stands at the center of Loya’s project
becomes clear, however, only at the close of chapter 4—an eleven-page analy-
sis of the finale (Vivace assai) of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody no. 14, including
two Schenkerian graphs, a chart of key-area relationships, and intricate maps
of the sections and subphrases. There is little to prepare the reader for such an
exhaustive, dense analysis, but it is a harbinger of what will come in the final
three chapters of the book. The goal of this particular analysis is to track
Liszt’s complex triangulation of the home key, F major, with the other key
areas A and D, each of them presented as a major-minor hybrid. The finale ul-
timately yields the triumph of F major, but before that conclusion arrives we
are in a much more ambiguous and unfamiliar tonal space. One of Loya’s con-
clusions to this generally convincing analysis is that Liszt’s musical thinking is
“clearly part of a cohesive style whose harmonic practice is quite unusual, if
not revolutionary, in the context of the 1840s and 1850s” (p. 151). It is im-
portant to Loya’s argument that the unusual harmonic orientation of this sec-
tion be seen as a transculturation induced by Liszt’s encounter with verbunkos
harmony (“The harmony is truly transcultural” [p. 145]). Here Loya asks for
a big leap of faith from the reader. He does not consider other possible influ-
ences, including Beethoven but especially Schubert, whose Lieder Liszt knew
intimately. Schubert’s music establishes similarly complex constellations of
key-area relationships, developing particularly rich implications from major-
minor shifts like those of verbunkos. Schubert’s Divertissement à la hongroise,
furthermore, played a key role in stimulating Liszt’s interest in gypsy music
around 1840, yet this point is passed over. It is possible that Schubert’s music
itself is already transculturated by gypsy influence, but if so, this would affect
574 Journal of the American Musicological Society

the argument about Liszt as active transculturator. More immediately con-

vincing are observations Loya makes about smaller-scale influences from ver-
bunkos practice. In the Hungarian Rhapsodies, for example, Liszt will often
drop a major triad below a melodic note in mid-phrase, without any regard for
harmonic function and in violation of all rules of chord progression or voice-
leading. This practice, Loya explains, follows the practice of gypsy ensembles,
where the violin is the lead voice and the accompanying instruments harmo-
nize in an improvisatory manner.
Chapter 5 develops a theoretical model for Liszt’s transculturated har-
monic practice, which has the character of a coherent system. Liszt’s practice
cannot be explained according to the “grand tonal narrative” (pp. 154–57) of
nineteenth century music, in which the major-minor system gradually evolves
into a chromatic system. The kind of harmony Liszt employs in his verbunkos-
related pieces is neither a modification of major-minor tonality nor a stepping
stone toward full chromaticism. It is simultaneously scale-like, making melodic
use of fixed constellations of pitches, and chromatic, using multiple scales and
unstable scales that together fill the chromatic gamut. In considering these
problems of compositional technique, Loya also asks probing questions about
hearing and the nineteenth-century listener. Did listeners of Liszt’s time hear
the nonstandard scales and harmonies of verbunkos music against the back-
ground of normative major-minor tonality? Or did Liszt’s music manage,
through the consistency of a “cohesive style” (p. 151), to install a new har-
monic environment in which the transculturated scales function as a norm
(p. 164)? Loya seems inclined to the latter, crediting Liszt with “having cre-
ated an alternative tonal practice through the use of these modes” (p. 174).
Yet the fourteen-page analysis of the finale of Hungarian Rhapsody no. 6 sug-
gests more of a dialectic between straightforward major-minor harmony and
alternative harmonic orbits. In this epic battle between pure B-flat major and
verbunkos-inflected D major, the home key of B flat clearly wins out, and with
quite a bit of heroic panache.
Chapters 6 and 7 move beyond the Hungarian Rhapsodies to discuss a
wide variety of compositions from the last three decades of Liszt’s life that
somehow incorporate or evoke the verbunkos idiom. These chapters are key to
the argument for Liszt’s transcultural modernism because these compositions
reveal verbunkos influence at deeper, less explicit levels. In these pieces ver-
bunkos practice is absorbed or internalized, appearing in textural, melodic, and
harmonic details but divested of all gypsy connotations. The pitch content in
particular becomes a fully assimilated part of Liszt’s compositional DNA, and
he mines the complex variability of the verbunkos-related modes to explore
radical harmonic conceptions, particularly in the late works treated in chap-
ter 7. Chapter 6 treats a number of larger symphonic compositions: “La
Notte,” Missa Solemnis, Scherzo und Marsch, Totentanz, and Mephisto Waltz
no. 1. Each of these pieces is treated separately to a combination of insightful
hermeneutic and technical analysis, and although these analyses make ample
 Reviews 575

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.

In this important and informative volume, Sabine Feisst paints a comprehen-

sive and nuanced picture of the American experience of a “polarizing figure in
twentieth-century music” (p. xi). Feisst takes a forthright polemical stance to-
ward the existing literature on Schoenberg’s American period: it is “fraught
with misinformation and misunderstandings, and lacks substantive discussion
of biographical, cultural, and sociohistorical contexts” (p. xi). This is rhetorical
staging; earlier authors have certainly considered biographical and sociocul-
tural factors, but Feisst formulates a much more exhaustive perspective from
thousands of sources, and her account offers unprecedented breadth and acu-