Music, War and Revolution

The first part of the three-part documentary focuses on the enthusiasm for the war in the musical world: when musicians and composers became fervent patriots and soldiers. How did the composers and musicians handle these times of war? How did their experiences at the battlefront affect their composing? What do the compositions reveal of this era and its spirit, beliefs and artistic changes of this age?

This documentary is dedicated to Russian composers of the late teens and early ’20s of the last century. The former “young wild ones,” composers such as Arthur Lourié, Nikolai Roslawets, Alexander Mosolov as well as Vladimir Deshevov and Lev Termen remain to this day relatively and unjustly unknown and their lives have remained largely unexplored. However, this generation injected life into the musical world of that time, greatly leaving their mark. The young composers were adventuresome; they flirted with futurism, wrote the first twelve-tone chord of musical history, invented the first electronic musical instrument and created sounds previously unheard.