Life After Postmodernism: Essays on Value and Culture ed. by John Fekete (review)

216 LETTERS IN CANADA 1987 short-lived Societe de musique canadienne into the Societe de musique contemporaine du Quebec are some of the subjects treated in chapters 2 to 4 in Part I. This material yirtually stands on its own, and while Papineau-Couture certainly played a major role in all of these stories, he often retreats into the background in their telling. This approach has a further advantage for the biographer. Except for his brief encounter with Nadia Boulanger and Igor Stravinsky, and a briefer one with Paul Hindemith - all in the 1940S - Papineau-Couture's life has not been filled with those encounters with famous musicians and artists which provide a rich source material for the biographer of musicians such as those named above. The impression one receives from this biography is that of a man whose impact, both as a composer and as a musical activist, has been linlited largely to Quebec and to Montreal. This does m?thing to diminish his accomplishment as a composer, but the fact that over two-thirds of his works received their first, and, in some cases probably last, performance in Montreal (such is the fate of twentiethcentury music). tells us a great deal about the man and his career. The book is generally well and attractively produced, with little evidence of poor editing. One complaint concerns the musical examples. Some of these are reproduced photographically from printed editions of the composer's works, and there is thus no excuse for the examples on pages 175 and 206, wheJ:e poor editing has cut off the left margin and the lower margin respectively. Another minor irritant concerns missing photo credits, and the inconsistent way in which the photographs are documented. In the photo with Nadia Boulanger and Stravinsky in California (29), for instance, everyone in the picture is identified, even though most are of little importance for the student of music history. In the photo of Boulanger's 1942 composition class at the Longy School two pages earlier, on the other hand, no one is identified. It is easy enough to pick out Boulanger and Papineau-Couture, but would it not have been pertinent to know who the latter's fellow students were at this crucial period in his musical development? (The only one that I can positively identify is the young American composer Harold Shapero, at the far left, seated, in the first row.) ,For the reasons mentioned above, this will be a useful addition to Canadian musical biographyI and to Canadian music history. It has set a good standard for emulation in subsequent volumes in the Collection Musique. (ROBERT FALCK) John Fekete, editor. Life After Postmodernism: Essays on Value and Culture New World Perspectives. xix, 197. $15.95 paper Life After Postmodernism is the second in the series of culture texts under HUMANITIES 217 the general editorship of Arthur and Marilouise Kroker. It is also the second collection edited by John Fekete after his very successful The Structural Allegory: Reconstructive Encounters with the New French Thought. Fekete clearly has a talent for bringing togethera wide range ofinteresting writers, this time around on the theme of value and culture. The essays are complementary to one another and stand together well - no small accomplishment for a collection. The base line for the text, which focuses primarily on value rather than culture, comes from Barbara Herrnstein Smith's essay entitled 'Value Without Truth-Value.' Smith's 'definition' of 'value' as 'neither an inherent property of objects nor as an arbitrary projection of subjects but, rather, as the product of the dynamics of some economy or, indeed, of any number of economies ...' (1) is reflected by a number of the other contributors. If there is a general starting point it is the post-Nietzschean cutting of value from the certainty of traditional discourse. Thus Heidegger, Gadamer, and Derrida set out the exhaustion site of Western metaphysics that becomes the target for the development of each contributor's own 'economy.' These economies tend to find in art or the aesthetic the relational basis for value. As Smith shows in her very readable essay, these valuations are not in the form of Habermas's image...