Ep. 23 – David Rothenberg on playing music with whales and nightingales

“Science and art,” Rothenberg says, “have different criteria for truth.” Photo courtesy of David Rothenberg.

When our guest, philosopher and musician David Rothenberg, was seventeen, he landed a summer job tracking the flightpaths of birds in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. One day, while transcribing the sweeping flightpath of a hawk, he suddenly lost sight of the creature. He sat down, listening, and heard a rustle in the leaves above him. 

The raptor was sitting on a branch “right above me,” Rothenberg writes in his new book, Nightingales in Berlin, “looking down at the map where I’d been tracking his movements, as if he’d figured out what I was doing, much to his displeasure.” 

Rothenberg was suddenly inspired. He set the map aside, picked up a small penny whistle, and began to play along, joining the chorus of birdsong overhead.

“You hear this crazy music under the water. When you join into it you realize it’s a whole musical world in which each whale is singing their own song and we’re not sure how much they listen to each other, how much they overlap …” Rothenberg says. “So it’s not so surprising that they’d hear you and change what they’re doing.” Photo courtesy of David Rothenberg.
“We can’t even explain what human music means,” Rothenberg says. “What does a piece of music mean that doesn’t have words? We have no idea. But we know that it touches us, that it’s important.” Photo courtesy of David Rothenberg.

Thus began Rothenberg’s decades’ long exploration of the music of nature — a quest chronicled in the BBC documentary, Why Birds Sing, based on his book of the same title. Rothenberg has spent decades collecting and studying the calls of birds, bugs, whales and other animals. Since the early 2000s, he has taken his clarinet and saxophone to some of the furthest corners of the planet. The result is a new form of music that  invites us to question where art ends and science begins. In this episode, we speak with David about his unorthodox project, Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, and what it’s like to accompany the sounds and songs of beings who may vanish from the earth.

Rothenberg’s many books exploring nature’s musicality include The Thousand Mile Song, Survival of the Beautiful, and Bug Music. His work has been translated into more than eleven languages, and his twenty-one music albums include One Dark Night I left My Silent House, released by ECM.

“I think what all these humans throughout history are thinking is that there’s something about these repetitive, more extended and often beautiful phrases that people recognize are closer to music than language,” Rothenberg says. “What does it mean to be closer to music than language? It means that in the performance of these patterns over and over again, the meaning comes across in the performance, not in what it stands for.” Photo courtesy of David Rothenberg.
“[The] original Songs of the Humpback Whale was a powerful musical and environmental statement, but in the decades since, our openness to hearing ever more diverse kinds of sounds as music has made it possible to feel far more confident listening and playing along to this underwater music, and to get further and further inside the whale,” Rothenberg wrote in The New York Times. “Once inside, we can never completely come out. Our whole sense of music has been irrevocably changed.”
Diagram courtesy of David Rothenberg.

Recommendations:

Grizzly Man, documentary film by Walter Herzog

The Bear Comes Home: A Novel by Rafi Zabor

Reindeer Moon by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

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