Outside Ravel's tomb (Tracing the historical and philosophical meaning of Le 'Tombeau de Couperin' and L' 'Enfant et les sortileges')

Authors
Citation
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
Citations number
101
Categorie Soggetti
Performing Arts
Journal title
JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY
ISSN journal
00030139 → ACNP
Volume
52
Issue
3
Year of publication
1999
Pages
465 - 530
Database
ISI
SICI code
0003-0139(199923)52:3<465:ORT(TH>2.0.ZU;2-0
Abstract
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.