August 20, 2020 55
Ecologists have long resisted the
human tendency to anthropomorphize
nondomesticated animals, perhaps
fearing that we will imagine Cecil the
lion, or Keiko the orca, or Diego the
amorous Galápagos tortoise as some-
thing like a collective pet—an animal
divorced from its habitat and its fel-
lows, needing only our attention for
survival. While the stories that emerge
from animal tracking data do invite
us to name and otherwise become at-
tached to individual animals, Pschera
argues that this is a potential boon for
conservation, deepening and broad-
ening humans’ emotional connection
with other species. Today’s handful of
animal celebrities might, with the as-
sistance of technology, expand into a
constellation of more familiar individ-
uals—cherished ambassadors, so to
speak, from other species’ nations.
The American clarinetist David
Rothenberg has performed with an-
imals including birds, insects, and
whales. In his short, charming new
book, Nightingales in Berlin, he re-
counts his efforts to jam with one of
the animal kingdom’s most flamboy-
ant musicians. Every year between late
April and late May, as nightingales re-
turn to Berlin from their winter migra-
tion to Africa, the male birds establish
their territories, sometimes occupying
the same roosts season after season.
Each night, they defend their turf and
attract mates with a loud, complex, and
highly variable song that Rothenberg
describes as “an unusual rhythmic as-
sault.” A single nightingale can pro-
duce hundreds of different phrases, he
writes, resulting in “a mix of rhythmic
chirps, spread- out whistles, and funky
contrasting noises neither mellifluous
nor melodic.” In spite of—or maybe
because of—the startling weirdness
of their songs, nightingales have long
been celebrated in myths and stories,
and invoked by poets such as Shelley
(“A poet is a nightingale, who sits in
darkness and sings to cheer its own sol-
itude with sweet sounds”) and Hafez
(“The nightingales are drunk, /wine-
red roses appear, /Sufis, all around us,
happiness is here”).
Rothenberg is a professor of phi-
losophy and music at the New Jersey
Institute of Technology, and his book
is in part a dialogue between art and
science, between his attempts to un-
derstand the nightingales’ songs by
immersing himself in them and sci-
entists’ attempts to do the same by
pulling them apart. When nightingale
researcher Silke Kipper and her col-
leagues at the Free University of Berlin
find that one distinctively buzzy tone
is more attractive to female birds than
any other sound in the males’ reper-
toire, Kipper wonders why the male
birds don’t just keep repeating it: “Do
they not know how well it works?” As a
musician, Rothenberg thinks he knows
why. The buzz, he speculates, is one of
the nightingales’ riffs, a cool effect that
loses its appeal if overused. “You’vegot to hold in your best licks, only let-
ting them out when your audience least
expects it,” he writes.
Rothenberg’s nightingale investi-
gations lead him into extended con-
versations and collaborations with
both scientists and musicians, and
into recurring after- hours duets with
the nightingales of Berlin’s Treptower
Park. (Some of Rothenberg’s interspe-
cies collaborations can be heard on the
albums And Vex the Nightingale and
Berlin Bülbül, both of which are fine
accompaniments to the book.) He finds
that in the spaces between the nightin-
gales’ phrases, and the pauses in their
back- and- forth with one another, he
and the human musicians who join him
can add their own improvisations. The
result is a kind of music that no one
species could make on its own.
Echoing Meijer, Rothenberg urges
his readers to listen more closely to
what other species might be trying to
tell us. “It is always more and less than
anything we can add to or take away
from it,” he writes of the nightingale’s
song. “Its rhythms are not boring, its
melodies continue to surprise. We can
never quite get it, this song intended for
nonhuman ears.” Though our under-
standing of other species may always
be hazy, we—and they—have much to
gain from our attention. QNew York Review Books
(including NYRB Classics and Poets, The New York Review Children’s Collection, and NYR Comics)
Editor: Edwin Frank Managing Editor: Sara Kramer
Senior Editors: Susan Barba, Michael Shae, Gabriel Winslow-Yost, Lucas Adams
Linda Hollick, Publisher; Nicholas During, Publicity; Abigail Dunn, Marketing Manager; Alex Ransom,
Marketing Assistant; Evan Johnston and Daniel Drake, Production; Patrick Hederman and Alaina Taylor, Rights;
Yongsun Bark, Distribution.A membership in the NYRB Classics Book Club ensures a monthly literary
surprise. Each month, editors select one book from our newest titles and
we send it to members as soon as it is available. The club is the most inex-
pensive way to own the books published in our acclaimed series.You may start your membership at any time, but if you join by August 12th,
you will receive Unwitting Stories, a new collection of stories by the
twentieth-century writer Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky. Now in a transla-
tion from the Russian by Joanne Turnbull, this is the fi rst English edition of
these stories. “These philosophical, melancholic, darkly funny tales merit a
place beside those of Kafka, Borges, and Calvino.” —Kirkus, starred reviewAnnual membership in the book club,
including free shipping in the US, is $150.With our special limited-time offer you will receive 13 monthly books for
the price of 12 PLUS a free bonus book: The Red Thread: Twenty Years
of NYRB Classics selected by Edwin Frank, Editor of NYRB Classics.To order a membership for yourself or for another,
please call 1-800-354-0050 or visit nyrb.com/bookclub.Our NY offi ce is currently closed, but the NYRB Classics Book Club
can accept new members because the monthly books are mailed from another location.“...a small publisher that is a national treasure, responsible as they are
for republishing or translating so many of the most astonishing books over
the last two decades.” —Lauren Groff, The New York Times Book ReviewJOIN THE NYRB CLASSICS
BOOK CLUB AND
GET TWO BONUS BOOKSANNOUNCING OUR SUMMER SUBSCRIPTION DEAL
Subscribe to both The New York Review of Books and The Paris Review
for the combined price of just $99—saving $60!That’s one year’s worth of issues for both publications, as well as the entire archives
—67 years of The Paris Review and 57 years of The New York Review of Books.From the early days of The Paris Review, when New York Review co-founder Robert
Silvers served as managing editor, the two publications have been closely aligned.
With your subscription, you’ll have access to fiction, poetry, interviews, criti-
cism, and more with some of the most important writers of the last century and
today, from Joan Didion to James Baldwin, Zadie Smith to T. S. Eliot, Hilton Als
to Elizabeth Hardwick.Subscribe now to save $60! Go to nybooks.com/parisAN INSPIRED PAIRING!