The Garden

If the first chapter is the making of a world, the second is the furnishing of a room inside it. Genesis 2 shrinks the scope. The narrative steps in from the cosmic scale of chapter one and walks into a single garden, with a single river, with a single named man, and lays out the first relationships in scripture: the relationship of the man to the soil he came out of, the relationship of the man to the work he was given, the relationship of the man to the woman who was given to him, the relationship of all of them to the One who placed them there. This is not the chapter of separation. This is the chapter of intimacy. The piece is built to match this change of scale. Where *In the Beginning* used the full ensemble and the full register, *The Garden* draws everything inward. The voicing is smaller, the register is closer to the human voice, and the harmonic language is gentler. Where the first track was vertical (heaven, firmament, deep), this one is horizontal. It moves the way a person moves when they are walking somewhere they know. There is a recurring melodic phrase in this piece that we think of as the *naming theme*. The chapter is, more than anything else, about naming. *Whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.* The naming theme appears first in one voice, then is taken up by another, then another, each time inflected slightly differently, the way a word changes when it is repeated by a different speaker. We did not want a piece *about* naming. We wanted a piece *doing* it. The phrase is offered, received, and offered back. The piece ends without resolving. The chapter does too. Adam and Eve are in the garden, naked and not ashamed, and the next chapter is already coming. The unresolved ending of *The Garden* is the only honest closing for a piece written from inside chapter two. Everything is still good. But you can feel that everything is about to change.

Composed, arranged, mixed, and mastered by

Brian McGauley · McGauley Records

Inspired by

Genesis 2:1–25, King James Version

Companion to

Drawn from Scripture: Genesis, Chapter 2 (Drawn From Publishing)

Released

MMXXVI · V · X