Maurice Ravel : Le Tombeau De Couperin – Part II. The Reminiscence of Baroque Dance Forms

"According to Alfred Cortot, the suite Le tombeau de Couperin could be divided into two main units. The first part presented in the previous volume of this journal, analyses the structural arch of the suite: the first two and the last part, which uses specific compositional technics of the Baroque era. This second part presents the middle section of the suite, the reminiscence of baroque dance forms, through the three contrasting dances: Forlane, Rigaudon, and Menuet. The fusion between the elements of the French baroque keyboard music and the characteristics of the modern piano music transforms this suite into a real and unique masterpiece. By analyzing the Forlane, the Rigaudon, and the Menuet of the suite we can understand the view of twentieth-century artists on the music of the Baroque era. Keywords: Ravel, Suite, Baroque, Reminiscence, Baroque dance forms, Piano, Forlane, Rigaudon, Menuet"

Outside Ravel's Tomb

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.