David Rothenberg is professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He 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 is the author of Why Birds Sing (Basic Books and Penguin UK), also published in Italy, Spain, Taiwan, China, Korea, and Germany. In 2006 it was turned into a feature-length TV documentary by the BBC. Rothenberg has also written Sudden Music, Blue Cliff Record, Hand’s End, and Always the Mountains. His writings have appeared in at least eleven languages. His book Thousand Mile Song (Basic Books), about making music with whales, has been the subject of several documentary films in French and German.
As a musician Rothenberg has performed and recorded with Pauline Oliveros, Scanner, Glen Velez and Graeme Boone, Peter Gabriel, Ray Phiri, Pauline Oliveros, Iva Bittova, Morton Subotnick, Elliot Sharp, and the Karnataka College of Percussion. His debut CD on ECM, One Dark Night I Left My Silent House, a duet with pianist Marilyn Crispell, came out in 2010. Rothenberg’s book, Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science, and Evolution was published by Bloomsbury in 2011. His latest, Bug Music, came out from St. Martins Press in April 2013, along with a CD of the same name featuring music made out of encounters with the entomological world. It has been profiled on Radiolab and in the New Yorker. He has sixteen recordings out under his own name, the latest are Cicada Dream Band and Berlin Bülbul.
Cosponsored by Ohio State’s Humanities Institute, as part of the 2015–16 Conversations on Morality, Politics, and Society (COMPAS) discussion theme on Sustainability; the Department of Art’s Living Culture Initiative; the School of Music; the BioPresence project; and the Borror Laboratory of BioAcoustics. Also co-sponsored with the Music and Sound Working Group of the Humanities Institute and the Wexner Center for the Arts.
