Prof David Rothenberg jamming with a nightingale in one of Berlin's forests
Credit: Sophie Kirchner
When David Rothenberg wanted to jam with nightingales, there was only one place to come. Nightingales no longer sing in Berkeley Square, he writes in the book he wrote about the experience, but they are everywhere in Berlin.
So the American musicologist and philosopher packed his clarinet and his saxophone and for several months he spent his nights in Berlin’s parks and forests, duetting with the nightingales.
In the resulting book, Nightingales in Berlin, which was recently published in German translation, and an accompanying documentary, Prof Rothenberg sets out to prove his thesis that birdsong is a form of music, and that nightingales love to jam with humans.
“In almost every human language, the word for the sounds a bird makes is ‘song’," he says down the phone from the US, where he teaches at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. “We didn’t invent music. We learnt rhythm from insects, melody from birds.
“When a nighingale sings, it isn’t a language. They have a few basic calls with meanings, an alarm call to warn predators are about. But most of it works exactly like human music: it’s about itself. ”
To prove his point, Prof Rothenberg has spent hours jamming with nightingales, and recorded some of the resulting music on two albums, And Vex the Nightingale and Berlin Bülbül. The nightingales do not attempt to imitate what he plays. They respond to it musically, improvising and riffing on the theme.
Prof Rothenberg spent months in Berlin playing with the nightingales
Credit: David Rothenberg
“The amazing thing about playing with nightingales is they leave a space for you,” Prof Rothenberg says. “They don’t like it if I just play back their own sounds to them.We tried playing recordings back at them, and they went silent.”
Prof Rothenberg doesn’t just play with nightingales. He has, as he puts it, “history” when it comes to playing with animals.He first advanced his theory in his 2006 book, Why Birds Sing, and he has jammed with humpback whales and insects as well.
But when it comes to improvisation, there are few rivals to the nightingale, the virtuoso of the bird world. Male nightingales — it is the males who sing — can learn hundreds of different musical phrases which they sing to attract females.
Biologists have long argued this is pure natural selection, and that the males’ song is intended to display their suitability as mates. But Prof Rothenberg says that argument doesn’t hold up.
“It’s not the strongest nightingales who sing the best, or the most fertile,” he says. “The oldest males have the widest repertoire of sounds, and I’m sure my fellow professors would like to believe it’s the oldest males who are most attractive. But the truth is it’s the same as with humans: the best musicians aren’t the strongest or most attractive. It’s an end in itself.”
Prof Rothenberg in pursuit of a nightingale
Credit: David Rothenberg
In support of his theory he enlists no less a figure than Charles Darwin, who wrote in The Descent of Man that animals display an appreciation for beauty, and said that peacock tails “made him sick” because they couldn’t be explained by natural selection alone.
“Biologists have worked out a sound male nightingales make which is the most attractive to females, and then they ask why the males don’t just make that sound all the time,” Prof Rothenberg says. “As a musician, that’s obvious. It’s like a riff: it doesn’t work if you do it all the time. You have to do it at the right moment.”
He is by no means the first musician to jam with nightingales. One of the first live radio broadcasts made by the BBC was of the cellist Beatrice Harrison playing with nightingales in her garden in 1924.
““You can play with nightingales in lots of places. People do it in Britain. But it’s a rare experience there," Prof Rothenberg says. “The city nightingales are used to people and all the sounds we make.These birds migrate thousands of miles and come back to the same place every year. Some of them come back to the same tree. "
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