The Fall

The chapter that names the loss begins with a question. *Yea, hath God said?* That is the first crack. Not a denial of the word, but a question about whether the word means what the listener thought it meant. Everything that follows in the chapter (the eating, the seeing, the hiding, the blaming, the curse, the exile) is downstream of that single moment of doubt. The piece tries to live inside that crack. *The Fall* begins in the same harmonic territory as *The Garden*. The opening phrase is close enough to the closing of the previous track that, played back-to-back, the seam is almost invisible. This is on purpose. The chapter does not begin in a different world; it begins in the same world, with a question introduced. The harmonic shift that defines the piece happens slowly, and the listener will not, at first, know it is happening. By the time the shift is obvious, it is already complete. The recurring serpentine line that threads through the body of the piece is the *yea, hath God said?* question, given musical form. It is a chromatic line that descends one note at a time against the harmony above it, and as it descends it pulls everything else with it. No instrument confronts it. No instrument resists it. The other voices simply move with it, because the question has been asked, and once it is asked the only direction is down. What we wanted the piece to capture is that the Fall, in scripture, is not loud. There is no thunder. There is no breaking of the firmament. There is a conversation, a piece of fruit, a sudden awareness of nakedness, a voice walking in the cool of the day, and a long quiet exile out of the only home anyone has ever known. We wrote a piece that mourns rather than rages. The final passage is in the same key as the first, but lower, and the listener can feel that something has been taken even if they cannot name what. The chapter ends with cherubim and a flaming sword guarding the way back. The piece ends with the harmony resolved in the wrong place. There is no way back. That is the chapter.

Composed, arranged, mixed, and mastered by

Brian McGauley · McGauley Records

Inspired by

Genesis 3:1–24, King James Version

Companion to

Drawn from Scripture: Genesis, Chapter 3 (Drawn From Publishing)

Released

MMXXVI · V · X