Genesis, Vol. VI — The Birthright and the Blessing (Original Score)

Drawn From takes a text you already own and gives it to another sense. This volume is Genesis 25 through 28 as a score: sixteen instrumental cues written to be played while the chapters are read. Each one takes the span the music asks for, and here that ranges from a whole chapter of digging wells to a single verse of a ladder.

Side A is inheritance, and it is mostly about wanting. Abraham dies in the first eleven verses and is buried by two sons who will not share a story again. Then twins who fight before they are born, and a birthright sold for soup by a man who was hungry that afternoon. The music on this side keeps offering something and taking it back, because that is what the text does with every promise in it.

The wells are the quiet centre. Isaac digs, the Philistines fill them in, he moves and digs again, and the cue for it is the longest patient thing on the record. Nothing dramatic happens. A man keeps finding water in a country that keeps burying it.

Side B is the theft, and it is the ugliest passage we have scored. A blind father, a disguised son, a mother who plans it, and a brother who comes home to find his life already given away. The Bitter Cry is exactly what it is called. There is no way to set that kindly and we did not try.

Then, at the very end, something the story has not earned: a man asleep on a stone in the middle of nowhere, and a ladder, and a voice that says I am with thee. Four cues, less than one chapter. The record spends fourteen tracks on people grasping and closes on a promise made to the worst of them while he sleeps.

Play it in order. It was built in order.

Composed by

Brian McGauley

Label

McGauley Records