Outside Ravel's Tomb

Abstract

In his 1956 study of Ravel, Vladimir Jankélévitch 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 les sortilèges (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 Panthéon (1794), which symbolizes an 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.

Orchestra Machines, Old and New

“…Like the punched paper rolls used by player pianos or mid-twentieth-century synthesisers, a pinned cylinder represents a musical code that is meant to be run , not decoded (Moseley 2016: 11). As Carolyn Abbate puts it, it is ‘a material trace of the musical work, yet not a score (a symbolic prescription for the work’s realisation) and not a gramophonic impression of the work’s sound (a recording)’; it is a place ‘within the machine where notation and fingers can become one’ (Abbate 1999: 485–6). Though the panharmonicon and other orchestra machines are arguably haunted by ghostly fingers, their cylinders may also be understood as places where notation and conductor become one.…”

The Phenomenon «the Life during the War» in the Maurice Ravel’s Piano suite «Tombeau de Couperin»

“…Проте серед зазначених вище векторів вивчення фортепіанного циклу є домінуючий. Найбільш широко репрезентованою у равеліані є дослідницька мета виявити принципи неокласицизму в сюїті й шляхи спадкоємності твору ХХ століття з французькою культурою XVIII століття (праці Керолайн Еббат [Abbate, 1999], Барбари Келлі , Джейн Фулчер , Чі-Ї-Чен [Chih-Yi Chen, 2013] та ін.). Зазначимо, що у наукових розвідках цього напряму воєнний контекст майже повністю випадає з фокусу уваги авторів.…”

Writing Novels, Simulating Voices: Euphonia,Trilby, and the Technological Sounding of Identity

“…The few accounts of the Euphonia in recent work come from musicologists, historians, and film scholars, with literary critics thus far remaining silent. 6 Meanwhile, a profusion of research on literary phonography has offered rich accounts of the reciprocal relationship between texts and technologies. Naturally, there is not a consensus among scholars on the relationship between the phonograph and literature: it has been positioned as "dig[ging] the grave of the author," as a fierce competitor for the "same cultural space as the Victorian novel," and as an interactive device used by and influential on eminent Victorian writers.…”

“…Billee's intense reaction to La Svengali's singing, remarkable despite the generally intense reactions that attend her performances, can be attributed to his shared mutability of identity with both Svengali and Trilby. He is smaller, more graceful, more sartorially inclined than his friends, and possessed of an "almost girlish purity"; in addition, he has a "remote Jewish ancestor," a "homeopathic dose" of "good old Oriental blood" (9,(6)(7)157). In contrast to Svengali and Trilby, though, Billee remains consummately English, his skills with French notably weaker than everyone else in his Parisian social sphere: when they speak French slang, he "couldn't understand a word of it" (31).…”

“…Striking resemblances can be observed between a sketch of the machine and its operator and one of Du Maurier's illustrations of Svengali and Trilby (figs. [5][6]: the overall composition and the positioning of the two figures relative to each other and the space of the WRITING NOVELS, SIMULATING VOICES of the wooden scaffolding of the Euphonia; and although Trilby has a body and the dummy is merely a head, Trilby's arm is stiff and automaton-like. These visual echoes of the Euphonia also appear in Du Maurier's sketch of disembodied female heads on violins (fig.…”