Introduction

The story of the birth of sound film outside the USA and the associated creative, technical, and cultural dimensions of music provision for the global ‘talkies’ in the early sound era has yet to be told in any appropriately comprehensive, detailed, and conceptually nuanced sense. Despite piecemeal progress in isolated areas, even in the broader terms of English-language film studies as a whole, it still remains too much the case that “more than the silent period, the first decade after sound outside Europe and Hollywood is a forgotten era of cinema history.” Given that the USA was for a time in the late 1920s and early 1930s the world leader in the technologies and commerce of sound film production, it is interesting that early stages in the formation of theoretical frameworks for the study of film music and sound derived significant impetus from Russian, German, French, and other European figures, as well as from consideration of NUGF repertoire.