David Rothenburg calls himself an interspecies musician. Inspired by jazz artist Paul Winter, he plays the clarinet and saxophone -- recording many albums that feature humans and nightingales performing together.
“The nightingale has 150 phrases and sings in a particular way," he explains. "Nightingales sing a phrase – doo,doo, dahtah datah dah, and then they wait. Then they go on: doo,doo, dahtah datah dah, so they leave space. What’s the space for? For another nightingale to go in between.”
Rothenburg’s made several trips to Berlin where nightingales and talented musicians are prevalent. He’s joined them in performing, written books, made a film and prompted at least one cranky neighbor to complain about all that noise in the park.
“When the police came and found this host from German National Radio with all this equipment recording out in the park, recording the nightingales while I was playing live, they said, ‘Whoa, this sounds important. We’ll make sure nobody bothers you,'" he recalls.
He’s also explored the sounds of whales.
“It’s an entirely structured song of a complexity no other underwater animal is doing.”
Those songs have drawn many scientists, hoping to understand what whales might be saying, but Rothenburgj doubts we will ever translate a message.
“I’m not so interested in decoding it. I’m not a big fan of this work using AI to decode the sounds of sperm whales. To me that’s extremely hyped up, and people are doing it, because they can get so much money from Silicon Valley to do it. It is not likely that these whales are conveying a lot of specific information. A Bach partita for solo violin has a lot of notes, but what does it mean? It doesn’t mean anything. It’s music.”
A full-time professor of music and philosophy at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, he’s grateful for the chance to explore what he loves.
“Because I teach at an engineering school where if you’re doing arts and humanities, they let us do what we want. They don’t tell us this is allowed or that’s not allowed. In general, you have to be careful in academia. They make you study everything instead of enjoying and exploring it, turning it all to dry, unfriendly, unhappy writing and research.”
He, on the other hand, delights in his work – listening, recording, writing and composing songs that combine human and animal creativity.
“One of them was a commission from an orchestra in Minnesota called Loon Asylum, about loons. Loons are a very common bird in Minnesota. Do you know what they sound like. (demonstrates) They have this haunting kind of call. It’s a call, not a song. They don’t learn it. Songs are learned. Bird calls are innate.”
As a visiting professor, he’s found a new sonic landscape to explore, along with colleague Matthew Burtner, who teaches music at UVA and records the sounds of snapping shrimp and other creatures off this state’s coast.
