Genesis, Vol. IV — The Covenant and the Fire (Original Score)

Drawn From takes a text you already own and gives it to another sense. This volume is Genesis 15 through 19 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 fifteen verses of a covenant cut at sundown down to three verses in which a city stops existing.

Side A is an agreement being made, slowly and at cost. It opens with a man told not to be afraid who immediately says what he is afraid of: he has no children, and his heir is a servant. He is taken outside and shown the stars. Then animals are divided, birds of prey come down on the carcases, a deep sleep and a horror of great darkness fall on him, and a smoking furnace and a burning lamp pass between the pieces alone. He is not asked to walk through. Only one party to this covenant moves.

The middle of the side is what people do while waiting for a promise. A servant woman is used and then treated badly enough to run, and finds in the wilderness that she has been seen. The score gives her more room than the arrangement that produced her.

Side B is Sodom, and it turns on the pleading. Fifty, forty-five, forty, thirty, twenty, ten — a man bargaining with God over a city, going down in steps, apologising each time, and never being refused. We wrote it as exactly that: one figure descending, six times, each pass thinner than the last. It is the longest sustained thing on the record and nothing about it is loud.

Then the fire, in three verses. Then a man standing in the morning looking at smoke going up like the smoke of a furnace, which is the same word the furnace used on Side A. The volume ends in a cave with two daughters who believe there is nobody left on earth, and that is where we leave it, because that is where the text does.

Play it in order. It was built in order.

Composed by

Brian McGauley

Label

McGauley Records