Shay Loya's challenging and fascinating new book examines in considerable depth the concepts of modernism and transculturation as seen in the Hungarian or verbunkos influences in the music of Franz Liszt. Part of the value of this book is similar to that of Jonathan Kregor's recent Liszt as Transcriber Footnote ¹ in that each book makes a case for the importance of works by the composer that too often are neglected and undervalued. Loya claims to break from the past to treat ‘works such as the Hungarian Rhapsodies as compositions worthy not only of serious aesthetic discussion but also of detailed music-analytical attention’ (p. x).

In an introduction and seven chapters Loya investigates Liszt's music dealing with the traditions of Gypsy music and concentrates on the ideas of verbunkos (Chapter 2), cultural politics and identity (Chapter 3), a critique of past scholarship (Chapters 4 and 5), and development of new analytical tools (Chapters 4–6). He concludes with an examination of the verbunkos idiom in Liszt's non-Hungarian music ‘Music of the Future’ (Chapter 6) as well as verbunkos elements in Liszt's late music after 1869 (Chapter 7). The chief aim of the book ‘is to develop new perspectives and analytical tools for Liszt's “transcultural modernism,” that is, for a better understanding of the way this idiom was integral to his projects’ (p. ix). These analytical tools, for example, include Schenkerian graphs, pitch class set analysis, and traditional formal analysis. Loya states that he is not trying to promote Liszt or support the notion that Liszt was a ‘prophet of twentieth-century modernism’, but ‘to shed light on unacknowledged aspects of his work that will help develop ways of understanding musical transculturation more broadly’ (p. 18).

Chapter 1 presents an overview of Transcultural Modernism. Loya does a fine job of outlining many of the truisms about Liszt in his Table 1.1 (pp. 22–3) comparing and contrasting the concepts of modernism and verbunkos. For example, modernism is ‘anti-commercial; progressive or reform ideals of educating the public and rejecting philistinism’ while verbunkos is ‘commercial; acquiescing to popular demand’ (p. 23). Loya poses the question regarding these two concepts in Liszt's oeuvre: ‘Was this traditional [Gypsy] music helpful to or counterproductive for his progressive ideas and techniques?’ (p. 1). He concludes:

Perhaps the most significant challenge faced by Loya in this chapter is to define exactly what he means by ‘transcultural modernism’. He acknowledges early in his book that ‘such a sprawling term [as modernism] is amenable to several definitions and even to conflicting aesthetic and historical agendas’ (p. 17). But his discussions of transculturation are often sprawling as well. He writes, ‘In reality, transculturation is a slow and spiral-like process: while it is undeniable that transculturation depended in the past century due to greater contact between cultures, some of the same issues from previous centuries are revisited, time and again, in different ways by different generations of composers’ (p. 34). In discussing both terms, he writes, ‘Transcultural modernism could be said to be a moment of distinct and often conscious aesthetic break or departure within longer transcultural processes, just as modernism more generally around 1848 can be said to be a moment of acute aesthetic and political crisis within a longer and slower-moving period of modernity, the latter beginning – depending on one's definition – with the Renaissance, the Enlightenment or the Industrial Revolution’ (p. 25). These sentences illustrate the breadth of his topic, but also the difficulties of clearly reigning in all the parameters of the terminology.

The issue of definitions continues with Loya's explanation of transcultural analysis: ‘A transcultural analysis, then, aims to reveal new cultural forms both in the peripheries and at the center. It recognizes the asymmetry of political power and, at the same time, that cultural dissemination and evolution often work despite and against these power structures’ (p. 6). He later suggests, ‘A transcultural analysis of composition will seek, therefore, the points of merger, and will especially reveal this dynamism in works where the verbunkos idiom is absolutely integral to the compositional conception and, in our case, where it creates a particularly Lisztian modernism’ (p. 10). These goals are indeed bold and praiseworthy, but they can be difficult to achieve with concrete explanations.

Starting with ‘Harmony and Structure of the Verbunkos Idiom: Introduction’ (p. 36) of Chapter 1 and continuing through Chapter 2, Loya provides an insightful description of verbunkos that may be the clearest summary I have read of its pertinent characteristics. Liszt's first attempt to incorporate verbunkos elements into his music was in 1828, at the age of 17, with his Zwei ungarische Webungstänze von László Fáy und János Bihari (S. 241). The circumstances around this work's creation are unknown, but it is noteworthy that Liszt was drawn to Hungarian themes so early in his career.

Chapter 3 ‘Identity, Nationalism, and Modernism’ offers a good overview of Liszt's views on Hungarian and Gypsy music. Loya also discusses the controversy of Liszt's 1859 publication of Des Bohémiens (and its republication in 1881)Footnote ² as well as Liszt's generous role in the twenty-fifth jubilee of the Conservatory of the Pest-Buda Musical Association in 1865. A decade later Liszt was appointed President of the National Hungarian Academy of Music, which firmly established his close connection to his native land. Loya writes, ‘Liszt's importance to Hungary superseded whatever could be defined as his Hungarian canon. He was, after all, a towering musical figure of the nineteenth century who was born in Hungary, made an existential choice to remain Hungarian, and then also chose to become a national figurehead’ (p. 117). This chapter includes a discussion of Liszt's Hungarian Fantasy in which Loya presents a particularly intriguing suggestion regarding the soloist (as symbolically representing the ‘leader’) and the orchestra (representing the ‘people’). When the piano refuses to follow the prevailing key in the finale, Loya writes, ‘The piano's decisive correction [to lead from E major to F major] encodes the poetics of national consolation and optimism in a progressive tonal structure and exposes the ineptness of the closed form for this kind of musical narrative’ (p. 107). Loya also gives a clear historic context surrounding Liszt's song ‘Die drei Zigeuner,’ S. 320, (pp. 112–4), providing a fresh look at the song itself.

In Chapter 4, ‘Modernism and Authenticity’, Loya presents a valuable synthesis of what earlier generations of Hungarian scholars had to say regarding Liszt's use of verbunkos, and particularly the ‘abstraction of verbunkos-related scales to generate chromatic and even post-tonal harmony’ that led to Liszt the modern composer (p. 130). The chapter includes a discussion of Bartok's debunking of the verbunkos tradition and his article, ‘Liszt Problems’,Footnote ³ as well as later views of Hungarian scholars such as Bence Szablocsi, Zoltán Gárdonyi, and Lajor Bárdos. Loya finishes the chapter with an illuminating analysis of the finale to Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 14 (Fantasie über ungarische Volksmelodien). His convincing analysis leads him to argue that all the thematic-related repetitions that are common to the Hungarian Rhapsodies are essential to the overall thematic design. These repetitions are not as arbitrary as is often presumed to be the case. He also argues that verbunkos elements such as glissandi, modal inflections, textural parallelism and sudden key alterations are also key ingredients in this style: ‘These are not a string of clichés artificially superimposed on conventional major-minor tonality. Rather, they are clearly part of a cohesive style whose harmonic practice is quite unusual, if not revolutionary, in the context of the 1840s and 50s’ (p. 151).

Chapter 5, ‘Listening to Transcultural Tonal Practices’, begins with an historical overview of tonality from Rameau to the present day, examining these theories in context of other, non-Western, cultures. After this general discussion, Loya focuses on analyses of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 3 and the finale of Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6. His main aim is to answer the question, ‘how deeply did the verbunkos idiom penetrate compositional ideas, processes, and structures in Liszt's works’ (p. 154). By examining some of these rhapsodies – often works that scholars have most neglected – he is better able to illustrate the inherent complexities and harmonic subtleties in Liszt's rhapsodies. His primary purpose, I believe, ‘is to show how the Gypsy-band instrumental tradition affected Liszt's compositional thinking on a fundamental level rather than merely on an imitative one’ (pp. ix–x).

In Chapter 6, ‘The Verbunkos Idiom in the Music of the Future’, Loya examines five compositions (‘La Notte,’ from Trois odes funèbres, Missa solemnis, Scherzo und Marsch, Totentanz, and Mephisto Waltz No. 1) that are not specifically associated with verbunkos elements, in order to illustrate how these Hungarian idioms can be found in Liszt's non-Hungarian compositions. With these examples, he means ‘to show how Liszt's progressive compositional technique and poetic approach to composition – the core of his Zukunftsmusik – relate to the verbunkos idiom in many different ways, whether through direct or abstract allusions, surface or structural use of materials’ (p. 224).

In Chapter 7, ‘Idiomatic Lateness’, Loya investigates the transcultural elements in Liszt's late style (works composed after 1869) through examination of several clearly organized factors: rhythm, ornaments and melodic types, texture, repetitions and intervallic inflections, verbunkos scales and transcultural form. He observes that ‘abstract and concrete idiomatic features from every decade happily coexist at every level, from the smallest motives to large-scale forms’ (p. 249). Rather than concentrating on one or two works, he discusses examples from several of Liszt's late works, including the Csárdás macabre, Csárdás obstinée, Unstern! Sinistre, disastro, and the Mephisto Polka. He contends that Liszt may have self-consciously attempted to create his own late style in the manner of Beethoven's philosophically abstract late-style period, and suggests that many of Liszt's gestures, such as unfinished endings and fragmentary compositions, are composed ‘through a historicist and conscious dramatizations of lateness’ (p. 228). While this conscious effort may have contributed, in part, to Liszt's abstract and often dissonant late style, his depression, isolation and weariness played, I think, more distinctive roles.

Outside of ‘Transcultural Modernism’ and the complexities inherent within these terms, Loya does an excellent job of defining his terms, and he assists the reader greatly by including a ‘Notes to the Reader’ near the front of the book that explains frequent terms in Hungarian cited throughout the book. A useful feature of the book is the accompanying website (http://www.lisztstransculturalmodernism.com/) which includes 219 musical examples (the majority of which are not in the printed book). A major advantage of the web companion is the ability to listen the examples (some recordings and others Finale audio files). It is somewhat problematic, nevertheless, that so many of these examples are not in the book. Being so dependent on web examples certainly alters the reading experience, even if the web provides several advantages.

Loya's book received the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment from the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which acknowledges the path-breaking research he has conducted. Clearly, this research fills a needed gap in understanding more fully the role of Liszt's Hungarian heritage in his music. Through his in-depth and creative examination of these elements in Liszt's music Loya has challenged us to re-examine this body of literature in new light as well as the verbunkos idiom that may be present in many of Liszt's other ‘non-Hungarian’ compositions.