Are there any Mammals in the House? Oh David Rothenberg!

In 1992 Clarence Gatemouth Brown let Samuel, a dog, play on his song Alligator Eating Dog and I will never forget how the barking sound, something so common, added a sense of respect for Samuel.  For me it was Brown’s way of signifying it was not only about fearing the dog but listening to what it had to say.

 

Musician and philosopher David Rothenberg’s approach is kin to Gilles Deleuze’s work Becoming Animal in that it allows new perspectives on making music, and with animals.  One can also see traces in Rothenberg’s compositions and his concerts by making music with different types of musicians and other species to Donna Haraway. The eco-feminist biologist and writer promotes making things with multiple species so that we can create new possibilities for survival on earth.

 

The interspecies musician Rothenberg and his work as an eco-musicologist are intriguing to me more as reminder of how essential the songs of other animals and even plants are to our human livelihood.  It is inspiring to watch and listen to all of Rothenberg’s communal approaches that are re-introducing me to the sound and songs of the non-human voice. In particular his work in the natural habitats of the animals: from his more recent performing with the nightingales in Berlin, to his string and wind instrument-incognito boat rides along the coast of Maui in 2007.

 

Music is extraordinary in that it can be performed between people who do not speak the same spoken language.  Musicians can interact, follow, flow with each other, be inspired and develop new things with each other. Inspired by this, Rothenberg has attempted to do this with other species, most successfully in my mind with the whales: making what he calls, cross species lines of communicating and making music. He and the scientists agree that the whales even reacted to Rothenberg’s clarinet music as he amplified it into the waters at Maui, where the humpback whales breed, and recorded the underwater jam session.  After numerous listenings to David Rothenberg’s 4.29 min recording, Whale Music, I could begin to hear where the whale phrasings responded together with the clarinet phrasings. The octave range of the whales is tremendous and Rothenberg emulates this with his instrument convincingly. 

 

Furthermore, it is touching to experience the bioacoustics of this work through the translations of the sonograms, beautifully rendered by the artist Alberto Lucas Lopez in The Shape of Sound (National Geographic, 2021). This may be one of the ways in which schools and music teachers of particularly young students can become more aware of the importance and opportunities of biodiversity and making music. This score of Whale Music reminded me of a quote from John Cage’s The Future of Music Credo, 1937: “The present methods of writing music, principally those which employ harmony and its reference to steps in the field of sound, will be inadequate for the composer, who will be faced with the entire field of sound.”

 

Although Cage and his peers were enthralled with man-made sounds and the “absence” of sound, I believe the words foresee the importance to be open for new inspirations as Rothenberg does with his co-animal recordings. Our natural environments and all animals are not new but there is an urgent call for our re-connection.  We need more awareness to the natural sounds in our ecosystems and not only the noises of technology. Rothenberg is a great musician and I enjoy hearing him play the clarinet, but I also prefer listening just to the whales and birds as solo voices. Whale Music from Rothenberg is not yet going on my favorites list, but I am willing to listen to more. I even whale sang with English words yesterday while preparing dinner for my family.  My husband understood what I was singing, because he as a child, like myself had heard the first album of whale songs when it was released in 1970.  When Dr. Roger Payne over 50 years ago first recorded the Humpback songs, he was not only amazed by the intricacy of their songs, but he wanted to bring awareness to the imbalance of the ongoing slaughtering of whales. This too is the importance of David Rothenberg’s interspecies work. To paraphrase another great musician, “Interspecies music” is here to stay.

 

Celina Lunsford, Frankfurt/M, 02/2022