{"title":"Valentin Kruchinin and the Queen of Mars: Early Musical Traces of Soviet Sci-Fi","authors":"HANNAH C. J. McLAUGHLIN","doi":"10.1017/s1478572223000269","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>Valentin Kruchinin was the first major ‘Soviet sci-fi’ composer, writing the music for Yakov Protazanov's silent film <span>Aelita: Queen of Mars</span> in 1924. While his score is regrettably lost, evidence of Kruchinin's musical vision for <span>Aelita</span> remains, including a two-page piano piece, ‘Aelita’, seemingly designed to promote the film. Lacking any ‘space-age’ musical tropes, this brief work instead showcases Kruchinin's affection for ‘eccentric dance’. Resembling a slow foxtrot, Kruchinin's piece brings <span>Aelita</span>'s cinematic world into contact with ‘light-genre’ popular fare, much of it borrowed from American jazz and maligned by critics for its ‘bourgeois’, ‘Western’ connotations. Within the context of Protazanov's anti-New Economic Policy film, Valentin Kruchinin's ‘Aelita’ comments on both the imperial past and the decadent allure of the Western present.</p>","PeriodicalId":43259,"journal":{"name":"Twentieth-Century Music","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5000,"publicationDate":"2024-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Twentieth-Century Music","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s1478572223000269","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"MUSIC","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Valentin Kruchinin was the first major ‘Soviet sci-fi’ composer, writing the music for Yakov Protazanov's silent film Aelita: Queen of Mars in 1924. While his score is regrettably lost, evidence of Kruchinin's musical vision for Aelita remains, including a two-page piano piece, ‘Aelita’, seemingly designed to promote the film. Lacking any ‘space-age’ musical tropes, this brief work instead showcases Kruchinin's affection for ‘eccentric dance’. Resembling a slow foxtrot, Kruchinin's piece brings Aelita's cinematic world into contact with ‘light-genre’ popular fare, much of it borrowed from American jazz and maligned by critics for its ‘bourgeois’, ‘Western’ connotations. Within the context of Protazanov's anti-New Economic Policy film, Valentin Kruchinin's ‘Aelita’ comments on both the imperial past and the decadent allure of the Western present.