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

In his 1956 study of Ravel, Vladimir Jankelevitch remarked that music machines and animated objects are pervasive motifs in the composer's oeuvre. These motifs shaped Le Tombeau de Couperin (1917) and L'Enfant et leas sortileges (1925), and are significant generally in musical modernism. To trace their historical and philosophical meanings, we begin with a peculiar visual icon: Rousseau's tomb in the Pantheon (1794), which symbolizes and Enlightenment sense of tombeau as "containing the dead" yet also "animated from within." This characterization, in an imaginative leap, could also be applied to a box that reproduces music: the musical automaton. Such automata were perfected 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 assumed new forms by 1900, we understand more fully the meanings borne by symptoms of mechanism in Ravel's piano suite and his opera. They are modernist reflections on human subjectivity in music, its loss in mechanical reproduction, and the futility of seeking lost objects by breaking open a tomb.