Nightingales, cicadas, whales, lyrebirds: the list of David Rothenberg’s collaboratiors makes it obvious that he thinks and feels music in a different way to most. Across his books, albums and films, Rothenberg has examined the sounds of the natural world and their inherent musicality. Although he tackles these projects with an academic eye (he is the Distinguished Professor of Music and Philosophy at the New Jersey Institute of Technology), he does not do so as a stoic, distanced researcher, but as an active and passionate participant. With his clarinet, he creates fascinating inter-species jams that span the realms of jazz, ambient music and electronica, all the while tapping into worlds that are ultimately beyond our understanding.
To understand the sonic beauty of nature, Rothenberg has his own deep relationship to music of human origin. One of his key inspirations as a musician and musical thinker is the output of the iconic jazz and art music label ECM. “What interests me in ECM artists is that everyone is such an individual. Everyone has a unique quality that’s not super-fast or constant, in-your-face showing-off.” For Rothenberg, the profundity of the label’s output is distilled in his first playlist track, Sinikka Langeland’s 2011 piece ‘What is Tomorrow?’. “This to me is like the ultimate ECM track, it has everything and it’s unique,” he says. “Some people say that ECM sounds are kind of blurry, generic, too much reverb – this does not have any of that. It really stands out because it mixes jazz improvisers with folk music. When I lived in Norway after college, I heard her sing and play the kantele, and what was remarkable about that performance was that she cried in the middle of it. She was performing this Finnish folk music that brings you to tears as you play and sing. She has a very special tone of voice, it’s unusual, compelling. In her band, she has these great soloists who don’t solo, it’s this beautiful understated style. You couldn’t find anyone else to play just like that.” As is the ECM speciality, it’s an intense but calm sound full of emotion, and one that is easy to draw comparisons to the transcendental.
Taking that vibe to the next level, another next playlist pick, ‘Prayer and Despair’, was composed by spiritual leader and esotericist GI Gurdjieff. “I learnt about [him] in high school and college, mostly. We were into all this spiritual stuff, we saw Peter Brook’s film Meetings with Remarkable Men, and read Gurdjieff’s autobiography that it was based on. What’s remarkable about him is, who knows what he did? Was he part-explorer, part-charlatan, part-mystic teacher?” As a composer, Gurdjieff’s work was no more ordinary than his teachings. “He wandered around and grabbed bits of the world’s music and put them together. He’d have these ideas and then Thomas de Hartmann wrote them down as Gurdjieff improvised them at the piano. With de Hartmann playing, it’s this beautiful historic sound. This music cuts through towards something really deep. You do not want to play it in the car, you’ll start to space out! There’s something special going on in this music. You can’t quite say what it is, and that’s why I keep coming back to it.”
Just as he undertakes his research with humour and joy, Rothenberg’s playlist isn’t solely populated by the cerebral or ethereal. “I’m not such a serious person, you know!” Which takes us to the 2007 Eurovision Song Contest entry for Israel, Teapacks’ ‘Push the Button’. An unusual pick for an American, perhaps? “This was from the first few years after I met my wife, who’s from Estonia. She’s really excited about the Eurovision Song Contest, which of course I’d never heard of. We were in Estonia when it was on, and this one song really stood out. It didn’t win, but it was by far the best. It doesn’t sound like Eurovision – that’s why it’s good! These guys are rapping in different languages, Arabic, Hebrew, French, and it’s all about nuclear war coming. If you find the video, this guy’s playing a double-necked oud, which I think is pretty funny. It’s just making fun of everything, it’s a very fun song.” Holding space for both the serious and the silly seems like an important quality for Rothenberg, but they don’t necessarily have to be polar opposites. “I guess there is something that holds this in common even with Gurdjieff, in this way of finding what’s most universal about the world’s music and putting it together. Not turning it all into this global pop mush where everyone really wants to sound the same, but something authentic, something that can grab you.”
And when music grabs you, it grabs you – and it can come from some of the most unexpected places, as it did with Chilean rapper Ana Tijoux’s ‘1977’. “I first heard this song on Breaking Bad, probably the only long-running TV show where it’s actually worth watching all the episodes. It’s brilliantly done. It was this scene where they use sped-up time-lapse photography and this weird song comes on. It’s not music I know too much about, but I like the whole mixture of things, cutting and pasting different fragments of all these different styles.” Rothenberg even uses Tijoux’s Spanish-language rap as a teaching aid. “I often teach music classes for undergraduates who don’t specialise in music, and a lot of them want to write papers on how hip-hop has conquered the world and how it brings everyone together, but many of them have no idea that anyone raps in any language but English. It doesn’t even occur to them that it could happen. I’m kind of astonished as to why that is; this dominance of English is not a good thing.”
One thing that English is near-perfect for, though, is telling stories about England. Simon Emmerson’s Imagined Village project updated the meaning of English folk music to represent the country as it exists today, and Billy Bragg’s reworking of the traditional ‘Hard Times of Old England’ sums up that goal for Rothenberg. “That’s just a really great song. It takes a classic old song but turned into what’s going on in modern-day England. What I like about it that is the spirit of it and how it’s put together, and how it gets to an optimistic possibility in the future, like there’s going to be a different England someday. I’m sure that’s a message you definitely need to hear now!”
Although this optimism reflects Rothenberg’s own work and music, for an artist primarily known for his connection with nature, I expected his playlist to feature more tracks of an animalian bent. But, of course, they all are – the unavoidable fact is that we are but animals ourselves. By helping us to remember and embrace this, Rothenberg says that music can help us make a difference: “Every musician should listen to the sounds of nature and all things around us. There’s so much awe and beauty, and the more we value this stuff the more we’ll work to save this natural world that is under siege. I have no illusions that music is going to save the world, but it can do its own little part. Sound is an incredible part of the world around us, and we’re just one of many creatures. That’s why I make music with nightingales.”
Photo: Still from the film Nightingales in Berlin (2019, dir. Ville Tanttu).