In the tradition of The Hidden Life of Trees and The Invention of Nature, Rothenberg has written a provocative and accessible book to attune us ever closer to the natural environment around us.Įd Nightingale and his fellow teammates are not the best players on the rugby, football or cricket pitches.
Through dialogue, travel records, sonograms, tours of Berlin’s city parks, and musings on the place animal music occupies in our collective imagination, Rothenberg takes us on a quest for a new sonic alchemy, a music impossible for any one species to make alone. He takes us to the urban landscape of Berlin-longtime home to nightingale colonies where the birds sing ever louder in order to be heard-and invites us to listen in on their remarkable collaboration as birds and instruments riff off of each other’s sounds. Rather than try to capture a sound not made for us to understand, Rothenberg seeks these musical creatures out, clarinet in tow, and makes a new sound with them. As vocal learners, nightingales acquire their music through the world around them, singing amidst the sounds of humanity in all its contradictions of noise and beauty, hard machinery and soft melody. What happens if you decide to join in? As philosopher and musician David Rothenberg shows in this searching and personal new book, the nightingale’s song is so peculiar in part because it reflects our own cacophony back at us. It is a rhythmic assault, always eluding capture. At times it is mellifluous, at others downright guttural.
But have you ever listened closely to a nightingale’s song? It’s a strange and unsettling sort of composition-an eclectic assortment of chirps, whirs, trills, clicks, whistles, twitters, and gurgles. A celebrated figure in myth, song, and story, the nightingale has captivated the imagination for millennia, its complex song evoking a prism of human emotions,-from melancholy to joy, from the fear of death to the immortality of art.
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