Inspired by the eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley—the first African American woman to have her poetry published—and released to coincide with the 250th anniversary of her publication, guitarist Charlie Rauh’s hypnotic chamber music album A Hymn To The Morning sits at a three-corner junction of sleep, dreams, and wakefulness. It rolls over and finds a lover still asleep and wraps its arm around them. It hears the bric-a-brac of pedestrians out in the street and slowly goes to the window. And, as it lays in bed, it gets blinded by the morning sun before opening the curtains to embrace it. 

Reading the Wheatley poem that serves as both album title and opening track, there’s a striking tension between full-throated praise of the morning and sun but also a kind of anxiety about it that threatens to become all-consuming. As much as Wheatley welcomes the light, she also wishes for shade and cover lest the sun’s heat and brightness become overbearing. “Ye shady groves, your verdant blooms gloom display / to shield your poet from the burning day,” she implores before ending overwhelmed and ceases the poem.

Where Wheatley cleaves uneasily and perhaps too closely to the daylight, Rauh and these songs move into and out of it with insouciant languor. Through jazzy chords, sultry vocals, and atmospheric ambient noise, this music melts the edges of time like Dali’s clock paintings. While harmonically sophisticated, it still has a sparseness of production and directness of composition that gives the illusion of simplicity. 

Rauh and his comrades create this illusion through how the guitar and the voice interact. Often, the guitar doubles the voice, playing the same melodic lines or voicing the chords such that the top note we hear follows the voice. Like minimalism, it gives us less to keep track of, less to hear and process and organize and instead leaves us with the space to dream and savor the precognitive wonder that waking up can entail. 

While there is singing here, there are no lyrics—only swoony oos and aahs rising and falling in oversexed reverie. It’s a smart choice in keeping the album a kind of open experience—no words to process or react to—but it’s also a smart choice acoustically. Like Wheatley always keeping an eye out for shade, these songs often exhibit a kind of chiaroscuro in their timbre. And on the vocal front, oo—considered one of the darkest vowels to sing owing to how it resonates further back in the mouth than others—makes up nearly all the notes sung on this album. 

And so even as bright as the melody might be, we still have this shaded vowel balancing things out and still keeping the music slightly under the bed covers. “Ah” works similarly. Though considered a switch-hitter of a vowel that can go light or dark, when it’s sung it serves a kind of liminal space that gestures towards and away from brightness just as Wheatley gestures towards or away from the sun before ultimately preferring to watch it from the shade.

In the realm of chamber music, it’s also great that Rauh does not deploy lyrics because of how it puts the vocals on an equal footing with the guitar (as does the convergence and divergence of the guitar and voice sharing the melodies). It reminds us that the voice is as much an instrument as it is a means to deliver words. In the pre-linguistic state it creates, we can more closely take in its dynamics, its phrasing, and experience the music of it. It’s the same thing I love about hearing foreign languages—how I can’t hear words, but only sounds and how I’m left to experience only the pitches and vowels and rhythms. I’m left with only a musical experience. 

Halfway through the album on track five, “Mneme,” Rauh collaborates with celebrated poet Cornelius Eady, who reads an original poem alongside Rauh’s guitar.

In the night the (mneme)
dreams return return (meme)
In the night (mneme)
Her mother’s milk (mneme)
In the night her father said to mneme

In the night a world untangled (mneme)

And so on. 

There’s a dream logic in Eady’s elliptical lyric here but it’s also important that his poem works with a musical logic as well, with a specific spoken-pitch for most of the sentence and then a refrain (“Mneme”) that has its own pitched melody. At the end of the track, Rauh and his guitar make that musicality explicit as they double the pitches and rhythms of Eady’s reading as hypnotically repeats “going back, going back, going back….” 

Steve Reich used this technique in his “Different Trains” for string quartet and tape wherein he takes recordings of memories by his governess, a porter, and Holocaust survivors and scores the quartet to both accompany them but also to play the melodic lines their speeches make. Reich had made earlier innovations in this realm of speech-as-music with pieces such as “It’s Gonna Rain” but I think it’s important to think about the connection between Reich and Rauh/Eady here because of how both of the pieces sit in a contemplative space and play with memory as both verb and noun.

“Mneme,” like Reich, shows us what music and poetry have to teach one another in the way of performance. Both arts steal from the other’s lexicon for the sake of analysis—poetry talks about rhythm, beat, tone, and music theory about phrase, syntax, grammar, and cadence—but rarely is it easy to think about reading or performing poetry in a studied way with nuance. English does not have inflected pitch like Swedish and Chinese; unlike Latin, we don’t have a system for meaningfully notating how long or short a vowel should last. And we too often reduce prosody to mentronomes and false dichotomies of accent/stress. What Eady and Rauh make so hand-slapping-the-forehead clear is the richness and necessity of a true dialogue between the rigors of music and poetry at the level of craft and performance. 

It’s something I think about a lot as a writer. While I have an MFA in poetry, I often tell people that I’ve learned as much—if not more—about writing and experiencing poems from my time studying music theory/composition, classical voice, and singing in choirs. How fruitful it can be to think of lineation in the sense of cadence as one would a phrase of music. The logistics and ramifications of consonant choices when spoken aloud. I would absolutely love to see more essays about these opportunities.

Rauh has already started doing this for music. In an excellent article on writing music inspired by literature, he says that he’s “been influenced more by literary mechanisms, like the arc of a story, the open-ended wonder of a poem, or the distilled simplicity of a single written word.” Hymn To The Morning is not his initial voyage into this music-literature dialogue, but rather the next lesson in a series of masterclasses on what the craft of music can take from the toolboxes of literature. He turns the poetic mode of ekphrasis—poems about art—on its head, showing us that music can go beyond mere citation of or homage to writers, titles, and phrases. 

It’s what makes this album the stunner that it is. In solidarity with Rauh’s attention to craft, we can get really technical with physio-acoustics like this and use music theory to breakdown the architectures and currents of the chord progressions and think about how guitar settings and their frequency levels affect the moodiness that pervades the tracks… and we can just sit with the album and let it wash over us. That, like Wheatley, like Rauh, we can sit in open-ended and wide—or closed—or semi-opened—eyed-wonder as we apprehend the world at hand and its luminous potential. 

You can purchase Charlie Rauh’s Record here.