David Rothenberg: On Natural Music.

    David Rothenberg’s creation of symphonies with animals posing as his composers, musicians, and instruments, has rendered the quote, “The music is all around us. All you have to do is listen” from the movie August Rush from 2007 audible. With respect and enthusiasm, Rothenberg listens to the natural sounds of animals and experiments systematically to create pieces which dignify the singing of various species.

During one of his early projects, Rothenberg finds himself analyzing the singing of cicadas. He recounts the necessity of the male cicadas’ song in order to mate. As he attempts to place the tone in order to play along to their singing, he realizes that the cicadas produce a certain rhythmic tempo, wondering if they are aware of the pattern they create. Then, when he joins them with his jazz clarinet to value their music, he does not react to the crawling on his arms, back, and face. Instead, he enjoys the music flowing within and around him.

When he works with whales, it may seem like Rothenberg improvises his part of the song at first. Similar to his project with the cicadas, his usage of a spectrogram demonstrates how he records and analyzes whale songs with which he works. In order to not disrupt the whales’ song sessions, he considers the original pace and pitch of the whales’ singing and inserts a compatible instrumental once more with his jazz clarinet. Recordings of Rothenberg playing both with killer and humpback whales reveal an intimate passion and joy as a product of the connection between whale and human collaboration.

The need to improve in style and performance led Rothenberg to Berlin, where he studied the musicality of nightingales. Initially, he expected their sound to be poetic and elaborate but he appeared to be pleasantly surprised by their style as they resembled disc jockeys – from outer space. His work then turned both into being entertained by the nightingales’ songs as well as entertaining nightingales with his interpretations again on his jazz clarinet as an attempt to connect the world of nightingales with the human world.

    Rothenberg’s method to weave human and nature sounds into a single song is genuine and appreciative. This is audible and visible in his research and analysis as well as his authentic style to incorporate his jazz clarinet, devoid of melodic changes or suggested improvements towards nature's sounds. Rather, he is inspired by the singing and just lets the music pour out of him. Another delightful aspect of his pieces is the intention to pause life, remove technology, and listen to the music around us for a moment. One of the reasons is an occasional need to be grounded by the simplicity of life; another is to identify how every being has an existential purpose and associated behavior. Consequently, humans need to relearn how to treat nature and its creatures at least as equals, if not as a priority.