Laws of Media: The New Science by Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan (review)

248 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 to. Yet, its range of topics and generally chronological ordering make it more than a collection of picked-up pieces. Even a rea4er unversed in the details of the subject will find Musical Canada a helpful introduction to the themes ofCanadian music history: colonial beginnings in French Canada, early music publishing (mid-nineteenth century), singing-schools and bands, local music-making in Toronto and Ottawa, biographical recollections , and, especially since World War I, the appearance of Canadian composers and institutions to support them. Among the articles in Musical Canada, four seemed to me especially noteworthy. Beverley Cavanagh's excellent 'The Transmission of Algonkian Indian Hymns: Between Orality and Literacy' shows not simply a case of the Christian clergy imposing a written practice on an Indian community, but a process of acceptance far more complex and interesting . Elaine Keillor's account of Ottawa's musical life in the 1870S, dealing in turn with general music-making, bands, facilities (venues), stage entertainment, concert repertoire, and organizations, illustrates an approach that could be applied to nineteenth-century local music history in general. (It would be helpful to see Keillor's data interpreted in a North American, not just a Canadian, context.) Keith MacMillan's 'Ernest MacMillan: The Ruhleben Years' provides a memorable glimpse of a Canadian musician's unusual experiences as a German prisoner-of-war. And Kenneth Winters's 'Towards the "One Justifiable End,'" a commentary on six recordings ofrecent Canadian music, demonstrates the kind of effective critical advocacy called for in Hello Out There! Documentary contributions to Musical Canada include Claude Beaudry's 'Catalogue des imprimes musicaux d'avant 1800 conserves ala bibliotheque de L'Universite Laval'; Erich Schwandt's edition of Musique spirituelle (1718), which he identifies as 'Canada's first music theory manual'; Maria Calderisi Bryce's list of 'Music Imprints of John Lovell from 1840 to 1888'; and a catalogue of the writings of Helmut Kallmann from 1949 to 1987. Compositions by Canadian composers Clifford Ford, Richard Johnston, John Weinzweig, and R. Murray Schafer, the first three dedicated to Kallmann and all reproduced from the composers' holographs, add to the book's value and handsome appearance. (The volume's only sour note is found in the articles' musical illustrations, whose staff-lines are often illegible. See, for example, pages 13, 22, 24, 26, 204ff, 276ff). (RICHARD CRAWFORD) Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan. Laws of Media: The New Science University of Toronto Press. xi, 252. $29.95 This text is a surprising posthumous gift from Canada's greatest cultural theorist. The collaboration with his son Eric has produced not only the most stimulating intellectual formulations but also the most welcome HUMANITIES 249 concessions to the norms of scholarship and argument since The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media. The hyperboles about found-ing a new science and making the laws of the human world manifest are an embarrassing irritant, to be sure, but at least the claims are softened by their contextualization in the humanistic tradition of Bacon's Novum Organum and Vico's Scienza Nueva. Meanwhile, the conscientious referencing apparatus and even the too-brief treatments of contemporary intellectual currents (for example, Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Derrida, Ricoeur, Steiner) should begin again to carve out for McLuhan a more prominent place in serious intellectual discourse than he has been accorded in recent years. The book has been in the making for a long time. It was already under contract to Doubleday in 1974; and 'McLuhan's Laws of the Media,' exposing the tetrad to publicview, was presented in article form in 1975in the journal Technology and Culture. Such books as From Cliche to Archteype, Take Today, and The City as Classroom have developed in some detail the various concepts brought together in this text, as have McLuhan's numerous talks and articles during the 1970s. In this sense, there is little here that would be new to the McLuhan canon. All the familiar propositions about the effects of new media on the scale, pace, and pattern of human life continue to provide the narrative underpinnings, the mythos, of the text. At the same tiIl1e, the consistently stimulating interplay among the major metaphoric oppositions in the...