Genesis, Vol. III — The Scattering (Original Score)
rawn From takes a text you already own and gives it to another sense. This volume is Genesis 9 through 14 as a score: sixteen instrumental cues written to be played while the chapters are read. Each takes the span the music asks for, and here that runs from two whole chapters of genealogy down to four verses of a curse spoken by a hungover man.
Side A is the world coming apart on purpose. It opens badly — the man who survived the flood plants a vineyard, drinks it, and is found naked by his sons, and the first recorded words out of his mouth afterwards are a curse on a grandson who did nothing. Then the nations spread out across two long cues that are mostly names, and the score treats them as what they are: a map being drawn, quietly, while nobody is watching.
Babel is the hinge. One language, one speech, one plan, and a tower going up. We gave the building four verses and the scattering five, and the second cue takes the first one apart from the inside. There is no thunder in it. The confusion is not violent; it is just that nobody can be understood any more, and the work stops.
Side B narrows from every nation on earth to one family, then one man. Terah sets out for Canaan and stops halfway, which is the quietest failure in the book. His son is told to leave the country, the kindred and the father's house and go to a land that will be shown to him, and goes.
What follows is not heroic. He builds an altar, then hands his wife to Pharaoh to save himself. He lets his nephew take the good land. He arms three hundred and eighteen men and gets that nephew back. The record ends with bread and wine brought out by a king nobody has met before or hears from again, and a tenth given without being asked for.
Play it in order. It was built in order.
- Composed by
- Brian McGauley
- Label
- McGauley Records