Nightingales in Berlin

Listen and celebrate! David Rothenberg's marvelous work reveals the living music around and within us. He explores with wit and insight the links and tensions among art and science, music and nature, humans and other species. A must-read invitation to deeper wonder and creativity. --David George Haskell, author of The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature In David Rothenberg's unique, beautiful, and vitally important new book, we are dropped into the wonder of a wild musical landscape, where birds have been singing for millions of years before the arrival of humans. In these pages we find our most authentic voice--one that never rises in isolation but in a great intertwining with nightingales, all beings, and the earth itself. --Lyanda Lynn Haupt, author of Mozart's Starling Rothenberg combines the close listening ear of a musician, the speculative thinking of a philosopher, the multi-sensory perceptions of a travel writer, and the curiosity of a scientist. An expressive story teller--eager to narrate his encounters with fascinating birds and human beings--Rothenberg sheds new light on what a musician can teach us about the natural world and about ourselves. --Bob Gluck, author of The Miles Davis Lost Quintet and Other Revolutionary Ensembles David Rothenberg makes music with whales, insects, birds, water, and wind, and writes splendid philosophical meditations about it all. In Nightingales in Berlin, he tracks the most celebrated of birds. Rather than gushing poetic about it as so many have done, Rothenberg confesses that the sound of the nightingale is completely 'weird, ' and takes as his project to pursue the unknown, to attempt communication with the alien. Listening carefully to birds and humans, Rothenberg offers thoughtful reflections on interspecies communication, dissatisfaction and perfection, science and art, signal and noise, evolution, the world soundscape, and the past and future of the planet. --Christoph Cox, author of Sonic Flux: Sound, Art, and Metaphysics