Genesis, Vol. I — The Making / The Garden (Original Score)

Drawn From takes a text you already own and gives it to another sense. This volume is the first three chapters of Genesis as a score: seventeen instrumental cues written to be played while the chapters are read. Each one takes the span the music asks for — some carry a chapter, one carries a single verse.

There is no narration here and no singing. Nothing retells the story or explains it — the words stay where they are, in whatever Bible is already on your shelf. Open to chapter one, start the record, and let the music keep the pace. Every cue is named for the passage it belongs to, so you can also just begin wherever you are.

Side A is the making, and it moves by division, because that is what the first chapter does. Light from dark. Water from water. Land from sea. Every day is a cut, and every cut makes a place where something can live. Day Seven is the only cue that divides nothing — twenty seconds, and it rests, because the text does.

Side B is the garden, and it is the same shape run backwards. It opens with a rib taken out so that two can stand where one stood, and then watches every other seam come apart. The Serpent's Whisper is not sinister; it is reasonable, which is worse. Where Are You? is a question asked by someone who already knows. The Flaming Sword is the longest cue here, because exile takes longer than making.

The words are not ours and we did not touch them. What a score can do is build a room around them — the right size, the right cold, the right distance to the far wall — and then get out of the way. Play it in order. It was built in order.

Composed by

Brian McGauley

Label

McGauley Records

UPC

701546252327