5 - Listening to Transcultural Tonal Practices

Summary

How deeply did the verbunkos idiom penetrate compositional ideas, processes, and structures in Liszt's works? This chapter will look more closely at the ramifications of tonal transculturation from a music-theoretical point of view, beginning with a general examination of the concept and history of tonality and ending with analyses of two Hungarian Rhapsodies, Nos. 3 and 6, that test this concept from a transcultural perspective. The focus on music from the Hungarian Rhapsodies will offer some continuity from chapter 4, and it will help us in the next chapters to interpret transcultural influence in non-Hungarian works and in works from later periods; this, in turn, will also help to establish continuities between Liszt's transcultural thinking and techniques in the 1840s and 50s and his procedures in later years.

There are two main reasons for challenging the more antitranscultural aspects of tonal theory and historiography. First, a critical scrutiny of these aspects is necessary because an unexamined borrowing of music-analytical tools can easily usher through the back door some theoretical prejudices that the transcultural analyst could do without. Second, we need to tackle the predatory nature of tonal theory, its hunger to assimilate, systematize, and homogenize a diversity of tonal practices, and the inclination to present the tonal syntax of works such as the Hungarian Rhapsodies as unremarkably subservient to a major and minor system. In this way, it is possible to balance a formal perspective on compositional craft with a more nuanced understanding of cultural context and then to force a confrontation between these modes of knowledge and perchance arrive at a synthesis of them.

The Grand Tonal Narrative

A truly universal definition of tonality, one that strips away any bias toward a specific musical culture or period in music history, would arguably tell us very little about each one of them. For this reason, whether the specific tonal system in question is that of maqams or of chord progressions, music theories tend to stick to the culture they know. In other words, it is in the nature of the discipline to be culture- and repertoire-specific in order to be able to say more precisely how tones are or ought to be organized. And, in general, the more developed and detailed a theory of tonality is, the more limited the repertoire it tends to describe best.