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Abstract
My project, Beautiful, Cruel Country, is a culmination of all the hard work that I did this year to create a new relationship with my music making process.Throughout this year, I went deep into a study of the history of my home state of Arizona, and I reflected on how that history has come to shape who I am. I traced back the lineage of my grandfather's favorite country music to find the folk music of the cowboys, whose music has incredible narrative power. But at the same time, it was haunting to see that many of the songs touched on a dark reality of the history of westward settlers — their encounters with Native American tribes. With all this in mind, I created music to answer the following question: How do I create a new musical sound that on one hand pays tribute to the great songwriters and storytellers of Arizona, whose stories are still embedded in the culture I grew up in — and on the other hand, finally gives justice to the victims of colonization of the American West, in a way that those stories never did?
Publication Date
7-1-2024
Campus
Boston Campus
Recommended Citation
Poorten, Jude. “Beautiful, Cruel Country.” Master's thesis, Berklee College of Music, 2024. https://remix.berklee.edu/graduate-studies-global-jazz/171.