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Music

What Birds Sing: Music From Nature

July 16, 2022, 3:00pm – 4:00pm

Join us on Saturday, July 16th from 3-4PM at our amphitheater where David Rothenberg will perform live with the birds and other natural sounds of TurnPark.
Rain date Sunday, July 17th

Tickets: What Birds Sing

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 seventeen-year cicadas to wail away inside a wash of white noise.
In this concert and talk he presents a musical trajectory through the world of birds, moving from species that live in the Berkshires like the hermit thrush and the catbird, onwards to more exotic characters like the nightingale, the shama of India, and the superb lyrebird.
His performances are accessible and enjoyable by audiences of all ages and he is known to evoke wonder and delight in those who appear, be they humans or animals.
David Rothenberg makes live music with the sounds of nature, records music with other species, and writes books and makes films about the process. He has performed and recorded with Pauline Oliveros, Peter Gabriel, Ray Phiri, Suzanne Vega, Scanner, Elliot Sharp, Umru, Iva Bittová, and the Karnataka College of Percussion. His CD, One Dark Night I Left My Silent House, a duet with pianist Marilyn Crispell, on ECM, was called “une petite miracle” by Le Monde and named by The Village Voice one of the ten best CDs of 2010. Rothenberg has more than thirty other recordings on numerous labels including Gruenrekorder, Clermont, and Oslo Sessions Recordings. His latest releases include In the Wake of Memories, with Berlin percussionist Volker Lankow and Syrian refugee oud master Wassim Mukdad, and They Say Humans Exist, with guitarist Jacob Young and percussionist Sidiki Camara, named best jazz album of 2020 by Stereo+ Magazine.
Rothenberg is distinguished professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
His books and recordings in the field of interspecies music include Why Birds Sing on birds, Thousand Mile Song on whales, Bug Music on insects and Nightingales in Berlin on one very special species of bird and the humans who make music with them. These works have been translated into many foreign languages and have been the subject of documentary films and radio programs in many countries, including Germany, France, Finland, Norway, Denmark, the UK and the United States, including the BBC feature-length TV program Why Birds Sing and the independent documentary Nightingales in Berlin.