The Golden Door: an American immigrant song cycle

Authors

Shaudi Bianca Vahdat

Files

Abstract

The goal of this project was to create a new song cycle in the contemporary musical theatre genre exploring the American immigrant experience. Over the course of the year, I interviewed American immigrants hailing from different countries of origin. I used the text from those interviews to write five original songs, each with its own story arc and from the point of view of a different character, all on the topic of immigration to the United States. With a band of five and an ensemble cast of four singers (which included myself), I rehearsed and developed the songs and added short monologues in between. The ensemble performed this twenty minute theatrical piece in a staged concert open to the public, and the songs were recorded in the studios on the Berklee Valencia campus. Beyond this year, my plan is to continue to build on the foundation of this version of the song cycle into a fully produced stage musical.

Publication Date

7-1-2018

Campus

Valencia (Spain) Campus

Keywords

musical theatre; immigration; creative project; documentary theatre; composition

Comments

Project Components: paper (.pdf), presentation (.pdf), audio files (ZIP file containing 5 .wav files), video (.mp4), chord charts (ZIP file containing 5 .pdf documents).

Recommended Citation

Vahdat, Shaudi Bianca. “The Golden Door: an American immigrant song cycle.” Master's thesis, Berklee College of Music, 2018. https://remix.berklee.edu/graduate-studies-contemporary-performance/131.