Experimentalism and the Mainstream in the Early Film Scores of Gavriil Popov and Vladimir Shcherbachyov

This chapter provides an examination of the early scores of Gavriil Popov (1904–72) and Vladimir Shcherbachyov (1889–1952) using Groza ([Thunderstorm] dir. Vladimir Petrov, 1934), the celebrated film Chapayev (dir. Sergey Vasilyev and Georgi Vasilyev, 1934) and the rarely discussed Peter the First (1937) and Conquest of Peter (1938, dir. Vladimir Petrov) to discuss how sound as a whole—with a focus on music and its own histories—continued some of the same musical/sound logic of modernist experiments of the 1920s, while satisfying the new demands for a homegrown ‘Soviet’ and ‘intelligible’ cinema of the early Stalinist era.