Shostakovich's thirty-nine film scores form more than a quarter of his total output. This is a remarkable amount for a composer mainly renowned for his symphonic and chamber music. His first film score, for New Babylon (1929), displays skilled handling of silent-film musical codes and techniques, undoubtedly built upon his teenage experience as pianist for silent films; his later film-scores are masterpieces that carefully balance music, speech, and sound effects.

Joan Titus's book is the first systematic study of the composer's film-music. It is therefore a most welcome contribution to both Shostakovich studies and the growing body of film-music scholarship. Titus deals with aesthetic and ideological considerations that affected the Soviet film-industry during the technological passage from silent to sound films in her introduction and throughout the book. Her discourse on these subjects is interesting and thought-provoking.

Historical information, interdisciplinary analyses and social commentary are combined with some allusions to semiotic methodologies. The latter, however, are accorded a radical laborsaving treatment, replacing the intricate web of existing semiotic designations with one umbrella-term: code. This approach guarantees efficiency, but is unable to convincingly analyze the various types of film-music elements and functions, not only limiting the discussion to traditional categorizations such as diegetic/non-diegetic, but also missing an opportunity for more subtle differentiations.

The book's introduction is followed by six chapters, each devoted to one specific film, and a final “epilogue” that closes the book. The six films are New Babylon (1928–29); Alone (1929–31); Golden Mountains (1931); Counterplan (1932), Youth of Maxim (1934–35) and Girlfriends (1935–36). Each “film chapter” describes its historical and social circumstances; its plot; an analysis of the relationship between the music's various functions and the corresponding visuals, and a description of its reception.

Titus used additional materials from film studios, archives, museums, and Shostakovich's private family archive. Studying such sources demands a heroic commitment to meticulous collection and analysis of information that is often fragmentary. Titus' many references to these sources are proof of her impressive research work, which is not described nor explained, but just implied: “six case studies selected from Shostakovich's early film scores, from 1928 through 1936, are the primary focus” (3).

This laconic account is puzzling. In fact, both the choice of these “six case-studies” and the time limits of Shostakovich's “early” film music are debatable. Omitting two out of the composer's eight film-scores written in the above time frame does not turn the remaining six into “case-studies.” A Shostakovich film-score list shows that the scores for the two missing films—one of them animated—except for some fragments, are lost. Still, Love and Hatred (1935) is available on YouTube and certainly deserves at least mentioning.

The time-boundary, too, is confusing. Are there stylistic differences between Shostakovich's The Youth of Maxim, (Chapter 6) and the two later parts of the “Maxim trilogy”: The Return of Maxim (1937) and The Vyborg Side (1939), ending the “early” period in 1939, rather than 1936? Or should The Youth of Maxim and Girlfriends (Chapter 7) belong with a “later” period? Hoping that Titus' chronological division is not based solely on the overly regurgitated 1936 Lady Macbeth scandal, a political and biographical but not stylistic milestone, an adequate reason for the dates-choice is still needed.

Some weaknesses seem trivial, but are not so: a complete list of the composer's film-music scores, their dates and directors, could shed some light on Titus's choices of repertoire; providing opus numbers would connect a particular film-score to contemporary compositions. The clips kindly provided on the OUP website, while a great idea, are extremely short (about ten seconds): their point is hard to perceive. Also, the index should be more carefully compiled: “Hollywood as film style,” for example, references only two pages. However, there are eighteen instances in the book in which Titus mentions the influence of Hollywood film style on Soviet film industry. A more attentive indexing could lead into further inquiries of this important but seldom-discussed aspect of stylistic processes in Soviet film-music.

The “epilogue” is mystifying. Describing YouTube clips that make use of Shostakovich's music as presenting sociocultural and political trends affecting YouTube members' musical choices and their combination with visual images may be interesting, but is irrelevant to the book's stated subject.

In spite of these structural and other weaknesses, the book presents intelligent and sensitive analyses, provides stimulating discussions of each one of the films, offers an exciting starting point for further study of Shostakovich's film music, and is definitely a worthy read.