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Abstract
My CE project “Home Is a River” is a recording project exploring the metamorphosis of home and belonging in the aftermath of immigration, consisting of four pieces: 1. Home Is a River 2. Conversations under Water 3. Land of a Thousand and One Smiles 4. The Sea is Calling Together, these pieces form a personal/collective narrative, based on interviews I had with five Iranian artists in the diaspora and my own personal experience. 9 years ago, to pursue my passion for music and singing, I “chose” to leave my country Iran. Throughout these years, I have often wondered: “How is leaving a “choice” if staying entails you having to silence or suppress a part of yourself? Is staying a “choice” if it compromises your freedom? And where or what is my home, if I don’t fit into the one I was given?” The title of this project is my latest answer to these questions, explored through research, poetry, storytelling, and music. I originally intended this project to be a story about the Iranian artists in the diaspora, as I often found myself frustrated with the misrepresentation and the negatively loaded narrative about my homeland in the western media. However, the result turned out to be a story relevant to all the nomadic people in the hyper-globalized world we live in today. Doing the research for this project, I spoke five Iranian artists and these beautiful souls shared their life stories with me. We discussed the concept of home and belonging, and I started finding similarities between the stories. This fascinated me. These interviews and my personal story became the primary source for the structure of the narrative and inspired me to craft the poetry for this project. I chose water as the main element of my project, as I found the “Home of the Immigrant” to be a fluid state of the heart and the mind, constantly flowing, just like a river; During my creative research I found “gravity” in belonging, and I noticed that water reacted differently to gravity. These “fluid” thoughts resonated with me intensively, and it naturally flowed into the music. The music that flourished out of this concept is a fusion of everything that I carry with me to this day; my Persian roots, jazz, and contemporary music, all coming together through a strange gravity.
Publication Date
7-1-2022
Campus
Boston Campus
Recommended Citation
Mousavi, Taraneh, "Home is a River" (2022). Global Jazz. 136.
https://remix.berklee.edu/graduate-studies-global-jazz/136
Comments
Project Components: paper (.pdf), presentation (.pdf), audio files (ZIP file containing 4 .wav files), scores (ZIP file containing 4 .pdf documents).