What Can Be Done Together?

A light wind stirs a sandy hiss from dry maple leaves in the canopy. Near the river, water churns over a short weir. Squirrels rustle through leaf litter. Visitors talk as they move between choir stations, laugh when the bird sounds leap from their phones, or stand and whisper as they gaze up into the canopy or at one of the wooden automata. I’m delighted to hear this convergence of musical evocations of the forest. But what strikes me most in the event is the balance between control and openness. Unlike in a concert hall where great efforts go into excluding outside sound, human creativity here exists in active relationship to the site and the moving bodies of listeners. The composer has a central voice but one with only partial control. Human creativity exists within the other energies of the place, including wind, traffic, chatty visitors, birds, and the inner lives of plants. This embeddedness aims to elevate our attention to these uncontrolled sounds. It is also music that invites community. We do not sit in the dark isolated from others.

Watch Yourself

We shed our earbuds and headphones before entering the forest. No rules forbid talk or laughter. I came alone but shared short conversations about the experience with a dozen other visitors, a rare occurrence in public spaces in the city or after a concert at Lincoln Center or another recital hall. Composer John Luther Adams has also noted the convivial effect of music played in unstructured spaces, with audience members free to move. Reflecting on Inuksuit, a piece for percussion usually performed in spaces like the forests of Vermont, he wrote, When I originally composed Inuksuit, I wasn’t prepared for the strong sense of community the piece seems to create. When music is placed in relationship with the nonhuman world, human community is intensified too. By inviting us to listen beyond the rigidly defined boundaries of typical performance spaces, these pieces allow us to better hear and connect with one another. Once one wall is breached, others follow. In this opening, we reinhabit our nature. Most of these sounds contain no information immediately relevant to our work or social lives. But for our ancestors, attention to sound was the source of food and knowledge about local conditions, just as it remains for people today who live and work in close relationship to the nonhuman world. This is the original function of hearing, to bring the stories around us into human awareness.

Looking For Changes

People who straddle the industrialized and ecological worlds deliberately switch between modes of listening. When I leave the city for places dominated by nonhuman beings, I repeatedly ask myself to open up. Listen, touch, smell, look, then repeat again and again. Only then can I hope to connect to and properly inhabit the forest, prairie, or seashore. When done with others, this opening necessarily brings us into closer human community too. On reentry to the built environment, I rewall the senses, steeling myself against the incoming surge and tightening the filter on what gets my attention. This includes mostly not interacting with other humans. To greet them as I would in the forest would be not only exhausting but out of step with the social dynamics of city life. Works such as Angélica Negrón’s Chorus of the Forest offer invitations to lower the sensory barriers we must sometimes necessarily erect. She fashioned this inducement out of the delight and power of human voices and the intriguing strangeness of plant sounds, experiences rich in their musical forms and reorientations of our senses. Musician and philosopher David Rothenberg takes the invitation further, beyond the boundaries of the human. His performances with insects, birds, and whales ask other species to participate.

Can You Deal With It?

We humans are not the only species with keen ears and voices eager to connect. Instead of layering prerecorded nonhuman animal sounds into a musical performance, as many contemporary ecologically minded musicians do, Rothenberg goes to living animals and offers them an opportunity for sonic dialogue, for creative reciprocity. In my conversations with him and in his writings, Rothenberg emphasizes the primary importance of listening. His musical roots are in improvisational jazz, where close attention to the sounds of other players is vital. To listen and play with another human player is hard. To do the same with an animal whose lineage separated from ours tens or hundreds of millions of years ago brings our ears to the edge of a vast chasm of sensory and aesthetic experience. Therein lies much of the power of his work. This is experimental biology and philosophy of sensory experience. Rothenberg’s most recent major project involved playing with nightingales over a span of five years in the city parks of Berlin. He did this sometimes alone with the birds, but also with other people, from violinists and oud players, to vocalists, to electronic musicians. Hearing the interplay between these human sound makers and the birds, experiences captured in the film Nightingales in Berlin, I am struck by contrasts of pacing. The nightingale song comprises bursts of trills, whistles, and gurgles whose details are too fast for our sluggish brains to grasp. Rothenberg asks of the birds and his fellow musicians, What can be done together? Can you ask questions through music? Are the nightingales riffing with the humans? The birds’ songs are complex, like insanely fast electronic music, continually remixed. Discerning responses to humans amid this sonic craziness is beyond me. Rothenberg explores these questions through participation. He says, My biggest hope with the project is that it should not end up being strange, but rather familiar. All music education, anyone who studies music . Humans, birds, and whales are three pinnacles of sonic culture. To put them into active relationship with one another is an act of respect and kinship, profoundly Darwinian and ecological in its approach. Yet to play music with birds in a city park also seems more than a little odd in the context of industrialized, technological human culture. His work, then, reveals our everyday estrangement from the living Earth.