Reviews: Baton Rouge-connected albums express the healing power of music
BY JOHN WIRT | Contributing writer, The Advocate of Baton Rouge
March 7, 2024
“Theoria” - Charlie Rauh
Music has the power to console and enthrall. That’s been true for humans for an estimated 40,000 years. As blues star and former Baton Rouge resident Buddy Guy said of the musical genre he operates in: “The blues chase the blues away.” And New Orleans singer Aaron Neville often cites music’s healing power. “It’s like medicine to me,” he said.
Countless YouTube videos of singing dogs and piano-playing cats suggest animals are not immune from music’s benevolent influence. Specific examples include British pianist Paul Barton playing Claude Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” for an 80-year-old elephant in Thailand. Another example, titled “AMAZING Animals Reacting to Music,” begins with a small girl playing a child-sized accordion for cows that run across a pasture and form a polite line as they listen to a jaunty little melody.
The latter video also includes a traditional jazz band entertaining its cow audience with “When the Saints Go Marching In”; birds reacting to wind instruments; elephants bouncing to boogie-woogie piano and swaying to a lively classical violin piece; and a young woman singing and playing ukulele for tigers.
In Baton Rouge last summer, guitarist and composer Charlie Rauh served as artist-in-residence at the LSU School of Veterinary Medicine. After observing veterinary clinicians and their animal patients, Rauh channeled his vet school residency into compositions for solo guitar and choir. Thirteen of the pieces appear on his album, “Theoria,” featuring Rauh’s solo guitar and three performances by the LSU A Capella Choir.
“I wanted to create a sound that could invite the sense of trust and hopefulness that dened my experience at the school, while not shying away from the emotional complexity inherent in medical treatment,” Rauh said.
Both the solo and vocal pieces are short, even fragmentary. The guitar music, especially, is intimate and dreamlike. Some relatively animated, jazz-like flourishes appear, but as Rauh plays with apropos gentleness throughout, reverie remains the dominate mood.
The album’s wordless vocal selections performed by the LSU A Capella Choir inevitably resemble ancient sacred chorale music — the Italian a cappella translates to church style. One vocal piece, the minor key “Theoria Part 12,” takes a darker turn, but the others are, like Rauh’s guitar selections, more examples of music’s beautifully consoling effect.