Lecture (in English): David Rothenberg: Music out of Nature / From field recording to live performance with musicians of other species

David Rothenberg will present his work making music live with birds, whales, bugs, and freshwater ecosystems in this talk with live musical examples.

David Rothenberg has long been interested in the musicality of sounds made by inhabitants of the animal world. He has jammed live with lyrebirds, broadcast his clarinet underwater for humpback whales, and covered himself in thirteen-year cicadas to wail away inside a wash of white noise. Rothenberg presents a musical trajectory through several of his favorite species, revealing their distinct and evolved aesthetic senses in an attempt to show that music can reach across species lines, from human to animal, and back. Creatures whose musical worlds we will enter include the thrush nightingale, humpback whale, three-humped treehopper, snowy tree cricket, seventeen-year cicada, white-crested laughing thrush, superb lyrebird, European marsh warbler, lesser water boatman and the mountain pine bark beetle.

Musician and philosopher David Rothenberg (b. 1962) wrote Why Birds Sing, Bug Music, Survival of the Beautiful and many other books, published in at least eleven languages. He has more than thirty recordings out, including One Dark Night I Left My Silent House which came out on ECM, and most recently In the Wake of Memories and They Say Humans Exist. He has performed or recorded with Pauline Oliveros, Peter Gabriel, Ray Phiri, Suzanne Vega, Scanner, Elliott Sharp, Iva Bittová, and the Karnataka College of Percussion. Nightingales in Berlin is his latest book, CD, and film.  Rothenberg is Distinguished Professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

www.davidrothenberg.net
www.terranovamusic.net
www.nightingalesinberlin.com

Lecture is organized within the Bio Troja Program and The Agosto Foundation Mediatéka – program supported by Ministry of Culture in cooperation with Rachot The Other Music Festival.