Inferno, Vol. I — Cantos I–IV (Original Score)

Drawn From takes a text you already own and gives it to another sense. This volume is the first four cantos of Dante's Inferno as a score: fourteen instrumental cues written to be played while the cantos are read. Each one takes the span the music asks for — some carry a canto, one carries a single line.

There is no narration here and no singing. Nothing retells the poem or explains it — the words stay where they are, in whatever translation is already on your shelf. Open to Canto I, 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 approach, and none of it happens underground. A man stops in a wood at the middle of his life, finds three animals in the road, and is met by a poet who has been sent to fetch him. That is the whole of it. The cues get slower as they go, not faster, because nothing here is a chase — it is a man being talked into a journey he does not want to take. The Heavenly Mandate is the turn: the moment the errand stops being Virgil's idea.

Side B is the entrance, and it is built on a single hard edge. The Gate is the loudest thing on the record and the last time anything is announced; everything after it is quieter than the thing before. The Great Refusal is written for the people who chose nothing, so it commits to nothing — no cadence, no key you could name. Then a river, a ferryman, and a crossing that resolves too easily, because Charon's objection is overruled rather than answered.

What surprises people is where it ends. The first circle of Hell is not fire. It is a lit castle on a green meadow, full of poets, and the sound of it is the warmest music here. The Citadel of Light is the only cue on the record in a major key, and it is inside Hell. Dante puts a library at the bottom of the first descent and lets the great dead welcome him as one of their own. We scored that straight.

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