In the Beginning

Genesis 1 is a chapter built on repetition. *And God said. And God saw. And the evening and the morning.* The same handful of phrases return seven times, each time describing a new act of creation, and the cumulative effect on the reader is something like a tide coming in. The chapter does not argue for the existence of order. It performs it. We took this as the architecture of the piece. *In the Beginning* is shaped around return. A small set of melodic ideas appears at the start of the track, and the body of the piece is those ideas coming back to you, again and again, in slightly different light. Each return is a day. Each day adds something the day before could not have had. By the end of the piece you have heard the same shapes seven times, and they have built a world. The track opens almost in silence. Scripture begins in formlessness and void, and we wanted the listener to feel a void before the first sound resolved into a chord. The first long held tone is the wind moving on the face of the waters. The first time two notes agree on a key, that is light being divided from darkness. Each new instrumental voice that enters across the body of the piece corresponds to a new act of separation: waters above from waters below, dry land from sea, lights from the firmament, living creatures from the dust. The piece does not climax. It rests. The chapter ends with God seeing the work and calling it good, and a held final chord is the truest reading of that line we could find. Verse thirty-one is not a finale. It is approval. It is someone looking at what is now in the room and being satisfied that it should be there. We tried to write a piece that does the same thing at the end.

Composed, arranged, mixed, and mastered by

Brian McGauley · McGauley Records

Inspired by

Genesis 1:1–31, King James Version

Companion to

Drawn from Scripture: Genesis, Chapter 1 (Drawn From Publishing)

Released

MMXXVI · V · X