DAVID ROTHENBERG - Playing With the Nightingales of Berlin
Berlin may be the best city in the world in which to jam
with nightingales. The place is full of Luscinia megarhynchos, the
Common Nightingale, a small brown bird with a song that can go on for hours,
any time of day, really, but especially between midnight and 4 a.m. Contrary to
early mythology, it's the males that do the singing, and they are relentlessly
loyal to specific sites. Some prefer the tops of lamp posts at especially loud
street corners, and nothing can dissuade them from keeping to their avowed
territorial spots. They return year after year to the same tree, or the same
traffic light, depending on the disposition of the bird. Of course you never
know what kind of crazy people or crazy birds will be wandering around a former
East German park at night amid Soviet war memorials, drug-dealer hideouts, and
romantic riverside paths.
(Photo: Erni/Shutterstock)
If you've never left America you have not heard a
nightingale. They exist only in the forests and towns of the Old World. Their
song has been beloved by poets for centuries, always a bit of avant-garde just
beyond human familiarity. They somehow sound not like usual birds, but more
like weird electronic music, with whistles, clicks, and occasional strange
bluesy tones. The kind of music humans often make in the clubs and cellars of
Berlin. Maybe that's why they like it here so much. Berlin is almost as cool as
Brooklyn these days, and a lot cheaper, so it's full of interesting musicians
and artists from all over the world looking for a place to convene and survive.
With all these nightingales heralding from trees and streetlights late into the
night, and enough people who like to stay up 'til dawn, it seemed the ideal
place to get humans and nightingales together for some interspecies creation.
I'm rather fond of playing music with the nightingales of
Berlin. What's especially fun is getting other people to join
in with the glorious chew chew chee and hear what happens as
their musical boundaries are challenged by the act of playing along with the
birds. So one night last May I gathered the coolest ensemble I could find, and
prepared to share their sense of surprise and astonishment.
We were: Cymin Samawathie, German-Iranian jazz singer,
well-versed in the poetic songs of Hafiz and Rumi, several of which deal with
nightingales, able to sing in Farsi, Arabic, German, Hebrew, and English; Maria
Magdalena Wiesmaier, classical cellist, who knows that a cello, together with a
nightingale, was the subject of the first-ever outdoor radio broadcast by the
BBC in 1926, heard by millions of listeners around the world; Korhan Erel,
wizard of electronics and live sound transformation, a recent émigré from
Turkey to Germany, who planned to use an iPad to sample the bird songs live in
the moment, repeating and transforming them to see how the bird would react; Lucie Vítková, singer and accordionist, arriving directly from Brno; and,
finally, Alexandra Duvekot of the Dutch rock band Blue Crime, who has also done
performances live with house plants at New York's School of Visual Arts. So
basically, your average Berlin pic-up band.
Now, you may wonder, do nightingales like making
music with people? The most rigorous study of nightingale response to playbacks
of their own songs, conducted in Berlin in the 1970s by Henrike Hultsch and
Dietmar Todt, concluded the following: There are three ways a nightingale will
respond to a strange new sound in its midst. First, if he feels his territory
is threatened, he will try to interrupt the new sound, what the scientists
called "jamming the signal," preventing any foreign message from
coming through, singing at the same time, getting in the way as much as
possible. That’s the aggressive response. But he may respond differently.
A
male nightingale who is confident in his territory, who doesn’t consider you
and your clarinet or iPad or voice or cello a threat, will listen to what you
play, wait a moment, then respond with his own short song, and then wait some
more. If you give him some space, play a short phrase, and stop, the whole
exchange is considered friendly acknowledgment, with each musician trading
ideas, leaving space for the next, accepting that we each have our place and
our song. Thirdly, a nightingale who considers himself at the top of his game,
the boss bird, best singer in the whole park, will just do whatever he wants,
maybe interrupting, maybe leaving space, singing whatever he wants for as long
as he wants, because you, or anyone else, does not matter in the least to him,
since he’s so convinced of his greatness. He hardly notices you or anyone else
is there.
We’ve all met musicians who fit into these three categories!
But what one person hears as "jamming the signal" could actually be
just plain jamming, trying to make interesting music together. Because music,
human or avian, might be much more than signals. Perhaps our artistry and form
is not just advertisement of territory and skill, but some attempt to work
together to create something no single species could make on its own.
Through flash messaging and the wiles of social media, at
least 100 people had gathered at the Treptower Park S-Bahn stop at midnight to
follow us to the venue, one copse away from the river's edge, where our
favorite bird, with whom we had practiced a few nights earlier, was ready for
showtime. As we quietly ushered everyone into the large grassy field, our bird
was already singing. Instruments and amplifiers were taken out. We were all set
to go, eager to figure out what sounds and rhythms might best go together with
what this bird might do, when we realized we were not alone. Right when we were
setting up our recording equipment, we saw them—our friends, the scientists.
Silke Kipper and Sarah Kiefer, nightingale scientists from the Free University
of Berlin, had chosen this same night to do some playback experiments with this
very same bird.
They were not pleased to see us. "What are you doing here
David? You know this is our study area. We don't want you ruining our data
collection."
We had talked about this earlier. "I know Silke, I'm
sorry, but this bird is so special. We've listened to many, but we keep coming
back to him."
"How do you know?"
"We were here playing just the other night."
"Playing what?
"Clarinet. Voice. Some electronics."
"What kind of electronics? I heard you just now, and it
sounds like you have nightingale songs on that iPad."
I had to confess. "Yes, we were sampling the bird, and
playing him back his own song. Looped. Re-mixed. Changed pitch. Sliced and
diced."
"What!" A sense of betrayal flashed across her
face, lit by the glow of the iPad. "This bird is ruined for us!"
"What do you mean?"
"We don't care if you play clarinet or cello or sing to
him, but playing him back his own song. That is a playback
experiment, that is what we are trying to do. I hope you
have the proper permits for conducting experiments with a wild
animal."
"Uhhh.... We are just making music together with
birds."
"You have compromised our research subject. Messing with his brain, his whole sense
of aesthetics. Who knows what you've done to him!"
The questioning continued. "What if you are upsetting
the birds?"
"Nothing we do seems to make them stop singing."
"If you don't chart their mating success you won't know
whether you have impacted their ability to attract a mate and procreate."
"I don't know that about the humans who hear my music
either." And with this, the crowd snickers a bit.
"Ugh," Silke sighs. "You win. Look, I see you
have a lot of people gathered here, you don't want to disappoint them."
She turns, dejected, mumbling. "Ruined, another experiment, ruined."
So we made the whole crowd get up and walk some more. To the
next bird, and a whole new realm of sonic possibility. While walking I composed
under my breath the letter I will write to these scientists. "You were
absolutely right," I'll say. "We do not want to ruin your data."
We usher our audience onto another lawn, this one a bit too
close to the new Burger King at the former site of the KfZ Prüfstelle at the
edge of Treptower Park, near the weird floating biergarten Klipper with the
seaplane and paddleboats adrift before the bridge to the Insel der Jugend. All
right, this is the second best singing bird in the park, but I think he will be
good enough.
It is now after midnight, prime time for the nightingales of
Berlin. Our boy does not disappoint. He is ready to defend his line against 100
eager humans who pose no actual threat, but sit reverently before him as the
inscrutable song begins. Alex, wearing all black leather, smiling quietly under
a tree, plinks a tentative note on her ukulele. Maria seems worried. She's far
from the classical hall she is used to playing in, but then again she has
always wanted more time to improvise. Korhan smiles, hair all frizzed out, a
little red lipstick on—you know, this is Berlin—and he taps the iPad to sample
a bit of the bird's song, loops it, transposes it down a few octaves so it
booms like an ecstatic whale.
Our bird keeps singing. I guess he is interrupting us, as
the scientists say, but as a musician I feel that he is enjoying the process of
joining in. I pick up my clarinet, try once again to become a bird. It might
actually be easier than playing human music, since these songs of evolution
have coursed through our DNA for millions of years. Then Cymin softly sings a
great poem of Hafez, who, strangely enough, is the world's best-selling poet in
English, in this century as well as the last. If we were to translate the
Persian we'd get something like this:
The nightingales are drunk,
Wine-red roses appear
And, Sufis, all around us,
Happiness is
near
hear the recorded track in this link
