Shostakovich and a Man With a Movie Camera

Recently I watched Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929) on Netflix. If you have the service, I highly suggest you watch this film, as I perceived it to intersect with the works of several contemporaneous much beloved (now, at least) Soviet composers, through a loose affiliation with socialist realism.  

Vertov's movie is often discussed in relation to early Soviet avant-garde art, in addition to the loose aesthetic of socialist realism. Much of the work of this time period throughout the arts (the late 1920's and 30's, at least until Zhdanov proclaimed realism as the official style of Soviet culture) embraced the avant-garde wings of modern art, and this included composers (mostly under the aegis of the Association for Contemporary Music).  

(Gavriil Popov, one of the now-forgotten members of the ACM)

Among these composers was a young Dmitri Shostakovich (22 at the time of Vertov's movie), himself not so much an avant-gard-ist, but nonetheless young, progressive, and seemingly a committed loyalist a his young age. Shostakovich also wrote more 'realist' works in his youth, typified by several works from the late 1920's and early 1930's including the ballets The Golden Age (1930) and The Bolt (1931), the film scores to The New Babylon (1929) and Alone (1931), the opera The Nose (1928), and his Second (1927) and Third Symphonies (1929). Several of these scores contain elements of a more avant-garde nature, such as the inclusion of the theremin and throat-singer (the score to Alone), as well as orchestral instruments mimicking the sounds of machinery (Alone and The Bolt), and even elements of absurdism and polystylism  (The Nose). None of these works were well-received in their time, even if did toe the party line (which probably led to Shostakovich abandoning the more avant-garde tricks of the day), although most of them are worthy of rediscovery. 

These more avant-garde works connects DSCH to several other composers writing works loosely defined under the banner of futurism. Works which may also contain odd or new instruments, polystylism, the music of machines, and powerful uses of dissonance. 

You may recognize the name of Luigi Russolo as the de facto head of the futurists, although several composers, even some more mainstream writers, contributed to this branch of the musical avant-garde:

Alexander Mosolov (esp. his work Iron Foundry, 1927)

Arthur Honegger (in his famous Pacific 231, 1923)

Edgard Varèse (Amériques, 1926; Ionisation, 1931)

George Antheil (Ballet Méchanique, 1924)

What makes these works the more noteworthy is that they were written between eight years of each other. 

So from Dziga Vertov to Varèse and back to Shostakovich, futurism, the music of machines, and socialist realism were highly influential to composers during the 1920's and 30's, even of that great writer of traditional symphonies and chamber music, Dmitri Shostakovich. Man with a Movie Camera shows how these currents affected one highly original filmmaker, and there are many more examples of futurists and realists in the realm of the visual and the performing arts, of course. I was simply drawn to Vertov's film because of its inclusion on Netflix. And there are many more connections to be made between composers and other artists and movements during the time period, but for now, after seeing this movie, I will not listen to Shostakovich in quite the same way ever again. 

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