Kelvin H. F. Lee

This chapter challenges the customary binary model of music historiography and develops a methodological framework for negotiating the multifaceted cultural orientation that underlies Enescu’s musical language. Instead of squeezing the array of influences inherent in Enescu’s music into the customary national/universal narrative, I relocate the discourse to the musical text and posit the idea of form as a relational object by recalibrating James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy’s concept of «dialogic form» and William E. Caplin’s form-functional theory via Georgina Born’s idea of relational musicology and Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory. Focusing on the first movement of Enescu’s First Symphony (1905), I then present two stories about metrical dissonances in the subordinate theme, where each serves to illuminate a particular cultural setting from which these phenomena might be originated. The outcome attests to a conception of form as relations of compositional practices informed by the sociocultural circumstances surrounding a work’s production. By foregrounding the historicity of such practices, it also calls for a reassessment of historical claims that are based upon a binary construction.