The Story of a Leader
Digital Sheet Music

Preface

"Exodus" is a great story that belongs to everyone. Not only is it central toJudaism, not only is it integral to the Christian Bible, it is an immortal storythat has been, and continues to be, an inspiration to oppressed peopleseverywhere on this planet. It is relevant not just as ancient scripture but asliving text, to be rediscovered by each new generation of an ever-wideningFamily of Man. The theme of struggle against oppression and slavery wasjust as relevant to the early Christians persecuted in Ancient Rome as it wasrelevant to the American Civil Rights movement of the 1960's, just asrelevant to the Soviet Jews wishing to emigrate as it is to the South AfricanBlacks resisting Apartheid. From the Dark Ages and the Spanish Inquisition,to Ghandi's emancipation of India, to the Holocaust, to, full-circle, theongoing struggles in Palestine today, the story of Exodus is a guiding lightin a dim and often grim world.

Notes about the Piece:

"The Story of a Leader is a collection of ‘re-chorales’ I created one summer when I wastotally immersed in a post-educational obsession with the 371 Chorales by JohannSebastian Bach. We used to study these to learn the rules of harmony and voice-leading(no parallel fifths, avoid crossed voices, etc.) at the Cleveland Institute of Music where Ibegan my compositional career. That summer, now a professor of music in my own right,I discovered many broken and bent rules by the master himself and, along with the gloryof being able to work through these Chorales myself at the piano, I felt an incrediblefeeling of liberation and possibilities unmediated by instructors of music theory. I beganby stripping away all that Bach wrote, leaving only the hymn tunes which were not his tobegin with. These tunes existed long before Bach used them for his tonal experiments,some attributed to Martin Luther, or someone else, others simply listed as ‘anonymous’.The same is true for the texts, which were then translated into English mostly in the 19thcentury (the provenance of each can be found herein on the first page of each of myreharmonizations). In some cases I modified the text to fit the context. I selected 12 ofthese ‘re-chorales,’ linking them together based on their texts in a kind of logic thatworked for me, and created a narrative that told The Story of a Leader (Moses). Thisstory is highlighted in the music with such techniques as cross-modal harmonies, pointsof imitation, a beer drinking song in one instance, and in another, to symbolize theparting of the seas for Moses’ people, an inversion of the soprano line in the bass."

-IK