David Trum

1955

Alto Saxophone with Fixed-Format Audio/Video Projection
Video edited by David Trum with public domain footage (Courtesy of The Prelinger Archives)

This piece was first premiered in Cincinnati in 2012 as a piece for live alto sax with projected fixed-format audio/video. The video presented here is comprised of the original projected audio/video, mixed with the live audio recording of that premiere performance.

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The video material for this piece comes from the 1955 educational/propaganda film “The American Adventure: America’s Distribution of Wealth” produced by George S. Benson and the National Education Program. The film champions American capitalism, citing the large thriving middle class and wide distribution of wealth as the key values that separate America from the socialist and communist nations.

In the 60+ years since the film was made, our country has gone through many changes, and our nation’s economic conditions and policies are now drastically different. Ironically, our political dialogue sounds largely the same. Though the cold war is long over, the heavy-handed moralism and warnings of communist bogeymen remain incredibly prevalent in our nation’s political discourse. The same inflated and contrived language that was used by the film in the 50’s (to demonize our enemies and exalt our nation’s balanced economy) is now being used to slander those who challenge the obscene wealth disparity we face today. The pervasive use of such dated and divisive language serves only to distract us from the issues at hand. By returning these cold war ideologies to their time of origin, the piece aims to disarm them of their potency and show the folly of their continued use today. Source video footage courtesy of the Prelinger Archives at Internet Archive (archive.org)