C. Abbate, Outside Ravel's tomb (Tracing the historical and philosophical meaning of Le 'Tombeau de Couperin' and L' 'Enfant et les sortileges'), J AM MUSIC, 52(3), 1999, pp. 465-530
In his 1956 study of Ravel, Vladimir Jankelevitch remarked that music machi
nes and animated objects are pervasive motifs in the composer's oeuvre. The
se motifs shaped Le Tombeau de Couperin (1917) and L'Enfant et leas sortile
ges (1925), and are significant generally in musical modernism. To trace th
eir historical and philosophical meanings, we begin with a peculiar visual
icon: Rousseau's tomb in the Pantheon (1794), which symbolizes and Enlighte
nment sense of tombeau as "containing the dead" yet also "animated from wit
hin." This characterization, in an imaginative leap, could also be applied
to a box that reproduces music: the musical automaton. Such automata were p
erfected in the eighteenth century, and musical performers were compared to
them, suggesting the uncanny aspects of both; a full intellectual history
of this phenomenon has yet to be written. But given this history, which ass
umed new forms by 1900, we understand more fully the meanings borne by symp
toms of mechanism in Ravel's piano suite and his opera. They are modernist
reflections on human subjectivity in music, its loss in mechanical reproduc
tion, and the futility of seeking lost objects by breaking open a tomb.