Form And Content in Commercial Music

Generally speaking, a souvenir is a token of remembrance, a symbol of a past that is meaningful to its creator, dedicatees, addressees, and the whole community for which it is created. A souvenir may quote, recall, evoke, imply, et al., and the realization of these potentialities is always strictly connected with the what, the how, and the why of its existence, structure, and creative/manufacturing process. As such, along the centuries and throughout the cultures of the world, the souvenir has been actualized, experienced, shared, and interpreted as a personal keepsake, a moral memento, a commercial reminder, a socio-political narrative, and so on.

This program offers three lively, colorful, and captivating orchestral works by two United States composers, born almost a century apart. These pieces exhibit the fruitful exchange and flow of musical material between North and South America that has long played a role in popular music, apparent not only in commercial song and dance music using Latin American melodies and rhythms but also in early jazz and blues where tango rhythms are so often heard, as in W. C. Handy's St. Louis Blues. And both Gottschalk in the 1850s, close to the beginning of a creative American musical tradition, and Gould in the 1950s, when such a tradition had flowered considerably, show a combination of seriousness of approach with a popular touch.

This 98-minute documentary, written, produced, and directed by Adele Schmidt and José Zegarra Holder of the Washington, D.C. area's Zeitgeist Media, begins and ends at the 2011 Rock in Opposition festival in Carmaux, France, and between those two bookends tells the story of this idiosyncratic movement – or style, or whatever you want to call it – that was birthed in the late '70s and has against all odds persisted on and off to the present day…