Written for full orchestra, the Incidental Music is built from five sections of the main opera into one shorter piece. The opening Overture, with a tempo mark of ‘running’, gives a nod to the first blues being written around the time of the birth of Jesse Owens. The work moves on to the slow-moving picture of Home, a sharecropping farm where Jesse Owens was first brought up. The third section, Klan, briefly orchestrates the tension of the first Act where the Ku Klux Klan play a prominent role. In the opera itself, the third Act is set as a series of film scenes to remember the famous film of the 1936 Olympic Games by the German filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl. In this section, The Games, there is the flavour of a German oompah band, and settings of the words ’chills my Jewish bones, Jesse’ and ‘friendship is twenty-four carat’. The work closes with The Empty Stadium, the stadium of Berlin where Jesse Owens triumphed.