![]() ![]() 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. 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. These motifs shaped Le Tombeau de Couperin (1917) and L'Enfant et les sortilèges (1925), and are significant generally in musical modernism. ![]() In his 1956 study of Ravel, Vladimir Jankélévitch remarked that music machines and animated objects are pervasive motifs in the composer's oeuvre. ![]()
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