ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a preliminary sketch of Shostakovich's writing about film music amid contemporaneous Soviet cultural politics during Stalinism. It is guided by the several themes that Shostakovich designated in his own essays, including the importance of professional film composers, how music is integral to film, the relationship between director and composer, and the specific qualities and devices for making music a driving, narrative force in cinema. It discusses Shostakovich, and other Soviet composers, as a potential theorist of film music. It uses the term theorist with caution, since the idea of a film composer was relatively new and still developing when he wrote the majority of his articles on scoring. But the idea of Shostakovich as film music theorist brings to attention the intensity of his writing about music for cinema and his serious involvement in the art over the course of his lifetime. Joan Titus, Hearing Shostakovich: Music for Cinema during the Cultural Revolution, in progress.
