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Russian Film Music portrays some of the most moving and thrilling muisc. After a seemingly inexhaustible yield of beautiful classical music over the past 300 years, the 20th century has accelerated the widening gap between serious music, usually the term for classical music, and popular music which is usually characterized by relatively shorter scores, simple harmonies and memorable melodies. However, isolated works of serious music have increasingly become “popular music” (so called “crossovers”) through simplification, arrangements and repeated exposure. Russian Film Music of the 1930s to the 1980s, with its clear classical roots, has in some ways, bridged the gap, although the music composed for the films produced in the seventies clearly reflect an increasing “crossover” tendency. The
very first composer to write original film music was Camille
Saint-Saens. In 1908, he wrote a suit for strings, piano
and harmonium for the film, L’assassinat de Duc Guise.
Similar efforts for composing music for cinema were ongoing in
Germany and the USA and in 1928, a German composer, E. Majze,
composed music for the Berlin premier of the world-famous
Battleship Potemkin by S. Eisenstein.
Lenin nationalised the Russian Film industry in 1919 and put it
under control of the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment who
demanded the production of films intended to glorify the 1917
Revolution. In 1922, the government created Goskino, the State
Cinema Enterprise, which centralized control of the film
industry. Goskino was renamed Sovkino in 1926. The first
original film music in the USSR was written by Shostakovich in
1929 for the film, New Babylon.
In the course of history, one may not be blamed for assuming
that V.I. Lenin had an eye for the obvious propaganda value of
the 20’s fast developing film industry when he once said:
“Cinematography is the most important of all the arts.”
We can surely add to Lenin’s quote that music is one of
the most important elements in the art of making movies.
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