The Iliad, Vol. I — Books I–IV (Original Score)

Drawn From takes a text you already own and gives it to another sense. This volume is the first four books of the Iliad as a score: fourteen instrumental cues written to be played while the books are read. Each one takes the span the music asks for — some carry a hundred lines, one carries four hundred.

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 Book 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 war stopping. That is the surprise of the opening books and we scored it as the structure rather than the exception: a plague, an argument between two men about a woman neither of them consulted, a soldier walking away, his mother going over everyone's head, and a god agreeing to let the Greeks lose for a while. Nothing advances. The army does not move until the last cue on the side, and when it does it moves as a list.

The Catalogue of Ships is the strangest thing in early Homer and the easiest to get wrong. It is a roll call — hundreds of lines of place names and captains — and it is usually treated as an obstacle. We scored it from outside: not the pride of each contingent in turn, but the sound of standing on a hill while an enormous number of people arrive. It is the longest cue on the record and almost nothing happens in it, which is accurate.

Side B is the war restarting, badly. A duel is arranged that would end the whole thing in an afternoon; a goddess lifts one of the fighters out of it before it can finish. A truce is sworn and broken by a single arrow. Then the armies close, and the poem takes its first casualty. The side is built so that every attempt to resolve the war is interrupted by something the men on the field have no say in — which is the argument the Iliad makes for another twenty books.

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