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Dec 16 2006

The Story of Job - Beginnings

In 1986, I started working on the lyrics for what has become Job: a Postmodern Opera. What spurred me to begin the project was a simple reading of the book. It struck me that “Job” was a magnificent work of epic poetry. I began to see that with some rearranging and rephrasing of the lines in the story, it could very well work as a musical or operatic piece put to modern music.

The opening lines of Job:

    1 In the land of Uz there lived a man whose name was Job. This man was blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil. 2 He had seven sons and three daughters, 3 and he owned seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen and five hundred donkeys, and had a large number of servants. He was the greatest man among all the people of the East.

became:

A long time ago in the land of Uz
lived a man named Job and righteous he was.
He feared God Jehovah and shunned evil ways.
He was healthy and wealthy for most of his days.
He had ten sons and daughters and seven thousand sheep,
Camels and oxen and donkeys in his keep;
A great many servants to serve at his feasts,
Yes, Job was the greatest man in all of the east.

Yes, it does have a somewhat Dr. Suess-ian quality, but in spite of that… or maybe because of it… I thought it was rather catchy. That encouraged me to see if I could get the whole story into some kind of workable form that someone (I had no idea at the time WHO that would be) could then put music to.

In the course of a few weeks I had a fairly significant portion done, having progressed to the point where Job and his three friends enter into debate about everything from God and the universe, the state of the world and man’s place in it to why Job in particular was suffering the way he was.

Then I think life happened and “the Job project” was put into hiding… or maybe it was germinating? I don’t know. At any rate, I pulled it back out early in 2005 and started working on it again; I’m still working on it. At least now, though, I have others who are working on it with me. After I completed what I thought was a reasonable amount of the lyric… it had a beginning, middle, and end… I approached my wife, Suzanne, and said “I’ve written an opera… but it needs music”.

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