Professor, Music Studies

This book was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and Summer Stipend.

The newly released Dmitry Shostakovich and Music for Stalinist Cinema is the second of my trilogy of books on Shostakovich's film scoring career. I examine Shostakovich's continued development as a preeminent Soviet film composer and his navigation of the Soviet film industry amidst the cultural politics of late Stalinism.

Based on archival materials and contemporaneous press, I combine musical analysis of eighteen scores with discussion of socio-cultural context and reception of his work. I frame the discussion using the concepts of the mainstream and middlebrow to highlight the complex role of Shostakovich's film music within Soviet arts culture. The composer's experience with diverse filmmakers, genres, and styles allowed him the opportunity to experiment with film scoring and musical meaning, which revealed his heterogenous and thorough knowledge of musical styles and his integration of classical and popular musical trends. This unusual and varied experience makes him an excellent case study for examining the development of the film composer within Soviet film industry during late Stalinism, and situates his scoring within an emerging global film music history.

This book includes a Companion Website that will be available in January 2025.

This book is supported by the AMS 75 PAYS subvention from the American Musicological Society. 

In the late 1920s, Dmitry Shostakovich emerged as one of the first Soviet film composers. With his first score for the silent film New Babylon (1928-29) and the many sound scores that followed, he was situated to observe and participate in the changing politics of the film industry and negotiate the role of the film composer. In The Early Film Music of Dmitry Shostakovich, I examine the relationship between musical narration, audience, filmmaker, and composer in six of Shostakovich's early film scores, from 1928 through 1936. I engage with the construct of Soviet intelligibility, the filmmaking and scoring processes, and the cultural politics of scoring Soviet film music, asking how listeners hear and see Shostakovich. The discussions of the scores are enriched by the composer's own writing on film music, along with archival materials and recently discovered musical manuscripts that illuminate the collaborative processes between the composer and filmmakers. The final chapter opens up questions about how Shostakovich is narrated by audiences in twenty-first century media, complicating notions of narrative and musical code.

This book includes a Companion Website that is openly available. 

This book examines the last scores of Dmitry Shostakovich within the context of the Thaw, from 1953 to 1971. Some of his most famous scores, including the Shakespearean adaptations of Hamlet (dir. Grigory Kozintsev, 1964) and King Lear (dir. Grigory Kozintsev, 1971) are among these last films.  

This book redresses the idea of the global in music for cinema, building on the past 15 years of study of film music across the world. Using methodologies from various fields, including musicology, film/media studies, and regional studies, nine authors grapple with what global means in between various sound media cultures; and theorize approaches that embrace liminality instead of nationalist models.