An aquatic musical adventure is taking place in Philadelphia this Sunday.
Bowerbird and LandHealth Institute have teamed up to present two outdoor performances featuring “interspecies” musician, David Rothenberg. If that title throws you off, don’t worry — we’re here to explain.
Tossing underwater microphones, known as hydrophones, into lakes and ponds distinguishes Rothenberg’s performances, where he puts on an improvisational musical duet with any and all sounds that emerge from the deep.
The settings for two performances include Edgewood Lake in FDR Park and Centennial Lake in West Fairmount Park. Rothenberg is a trained jazz musician, a naturalist philosopher, and a prolific composer and writer, who’s written over a dozen books and recorded forty albums. He said each of his duets holds a surprise.
“You’re dealing with nature, you never know what’s going to happen — you’re going to plug that microphone into a speaker, and you’re going to hear all these crazy sounds going on in the pond,” Rothenberg said.
Those “crazy sounds” can come from plants moving and releasing oxygen as a result of photosynthesis, or various aquatic insects like water boatmen and backswimmers rubbing their bodies together. Turtles or fish swimming through the water also generate their own music, said Rothenberg. However, he noted it’s hard to pinpoint the sounds’ origins.
“We only know 10% of the sound in an average pond, which seems crazy to me,” he explained. “Why don’t we know what’s going on? People haven’t bothered to listen.”
Many rhythms that nature offers are considered musical — like rustling leaves, birdsongs, cicada chirps or babbling brooks. Unlike most western music, the beats are unpredictable.
“I’m one of these people who believe that these animals have more interesting rhythms than humans,” he said. “Humans like these 4/4 steady beats. But nature has more irregular rhythms, very strange rhythms, and you can learn to dance to those.”
Bowerbird is a small experimental arts presenter. The LandHealth Institute is a non-profit whose mission is to reconnect Philadelphians to nature. The two organizations actually came together by accident.
“I had no prior relationship with the LandHealth Institute,” said Pete Angevine, a local musician who works with Bowerbird and helped organize the concerts.
“I reached out to David [Rothenberg] back in the fall,” Angevine said. “LandHealth had reached out to him the same week with basically the same requests. So, he kind of put us together, because we both had the independent idea to invite him to Philadelphia.”
Rothenberg plays flutes from various parts of the world and the clarinet (which surely would be welcomed by a certain pretentious and jaded cartoon squid). He also uses technology to sample and remix the sounds as they come through the microphone. The result is a hodgepodge of genres, like electronic music, jazz and even ASMR.
“The stuff that David’s playing, it’s unusual, it’s different, but it’s not alienating,” Angevine said. “It’s not harsh or challenging or difficult to listen to.”
“These sounds make you tingle all over,” Rothenberg said. “You can’t quite place them, but they kind of surprise you.”
Exploring “musical” ecosystems
And for all the skeptics, Rothenberg insists that the noises that come from the pond are indeed music.
“Music is what you decide to consider as music,” he said. “There’s no good definition for music other than that. You know, a lot of music sounds, somebody considers it musical, someone else calls it pure, raw noise. Surely, you’ve had that experience growing up liking some music your parents didn’t like.”
Princeton University professors, Gavin Steingo and Asif Ghazanfar, have created an entire project, The Animals Song Collective to further explore this idea — whether animal songs should be considered music. The two have worked with and organized concerts with Rothenberg in the past.
“When we say, you know, the bird is singing, is that just because it sounds musical to us, and how our brain was shaped by human music,” asked Ghazanfar, who teaches neuroscience and psychology. “Is it a creative act for the bird that it has an appreciation for?”
Steingo and Ghazanfar are interested in learning more about how music originated, how different cultures interpret it and what that can tell us about the sounds animals are making.
“The world is filled with forms of synchronization, forms of rhythmicity or periodicity, or regularity patterns,” said Steingo, who teaches music. “I think these are things that David Rothenberg is very attuned to.”
To Steingo, Rothenberg’s music is not necessarily about personal expressional.
“I think David Rothenberg has always been interested in music as something that doesn’t belong to an individual, but sort of patterns and forms in the world that you can tap into and ride as a wave,” he explained. “So, it’s a different way of thinking about music, but I think it’s valid to think of music that way.”
And the jam session is not just for people. Rothenberg said that the underwater creatures will also be grooving to the music in their own way. To prove they are also listening, he’s conducted multiple experiments.
“I even did this experiment like 10 times in the winter when there’s no sound,” he explained. “You punch a hole in the ice, stick the microphone in the ice, and above the ground, you play the sound of one of these insects. And almost all the time we heard it back like they were waking up in winter and making sounds. I couldn’t believe it was happening.”
In order to really understand what Rothenberg’s music is all about, people will have to come and hear it for themselves. The pond music session is not just a way to get outdoors, it’s an opportunity to connect with the different species living among us but are easy to ignore. After all, humans are not the only ones taking part in Philly’s ecosystem.
The concerts, “Secret Sounds of the Ponds,” will take place on Sunday, April 6 at Edgewood Lake in FDR Park at 9 a.m. and Centennial Lake in West Fairmount Park at 5 p.m. According to Bowerbird, the morning session will be family friendly, while the latter session is aimed for the “more contemplative crowd.”
