Composing for the Red Screen : Prokofiev and Soviet Film Paperback / softback
by Kevin (Assistant Professor of Musicology, Assistant Professor of Musicology, Michigan State Bartig
Part of the Oxford Music/Media Series series
Paperback / softback
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Description
Sound film captivated Sergey Prokofiev during the final two decades of his life: he considered composing for nearly two dozen pictures, eventually undertaking eight of them, all Soviet productions.
Hollywood luminaries such as Gloria Swanson tempted him with commissions, and arguably more people heard his film music than his efforts in all other genres combined.
Films for which Prokofiev composed, in particular those of Sergey Eisenstein, are now classics of world cinema.
Drawing on newly available sources, Composing for the Red Screen examines - for the first time - the full extent of this prodigious cinematic career.
Author Kevin Bartig examines how Prokofiev's film music derived from a self-imposed challenge: to compose "serious" music for a broad audience.
The picture that emerges is of a composer seeking an individual film-music voice, shunning Hollywood models and objecting to his Soviet colleagues' ideologically expedient film songs.
Looking at Prokofiev's film music as a whole - with well-known blockbusters like Alexander Nevsky considered alongside more obscure or aborted projects - reveals that there were multiple solutions to the challenge, each with varying degrees of success.
Prokofiev carefully balanced his own populist agenda, the perceived aesthetic demands of the films themselves, and, later on, Soviet bureaucratic demands for accessibility.
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Out of StockMore expected soonContact us for further information
- Format:Paperback / softback
- Pages:248 pages, 50 music examples and 26 photographs
- Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc
- Publication Date:06/11/2014
- Category:
- ISBN:9780190213282
Information
-
Out of StockMore expected soonContact us for further information
- Format:Paperback / softback
- Pages:248 pages, 50 music examples and 26 photographs
- Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc
- Publication Date:06/11/2014
- Category:
- ISBN:9780190213282