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Why Birds Sing: A Journey Through the Mystery of Bird Songx$7.63
  (9 reviews)
Best Price: $7.63
The astonishing variety and richness of bird song is both an aesthetic and a scientific mystery. Biologists have never been able to understand why bird song displays are often so inventive and why so many species devote so many hours to singing. The standard explanations, which generally have to do with territoriality and sexual display, don’t begin to account for the astonishing variety and energy that the commonest birds exhibit. Is it possible that birds sing because they like to? This seemingly naïve explanation is starting to look more and more like the truth.In the tradition of classic works by Bernd Heinrich, Edward Abbey, and Terry Tempest Williams, Why Birds Sing is a lyric exploration of bird song that blends the latest scientific research with a deep understanding of musical beauty and form. Based on conversations with neuroscientists, ecologists, and composers, it is the first book to investigate why birds sing and how, and what effect their music has on other animals—particularly humans. Whether playing the clarinet with the white-crested laughing thrush in Pittsburgh, or jamming in the Australian winter breeding grounds of the Albert’s lyrebird, Rothenberg journeys to the heart and soul of bird song. Why Birds Sing offers an intimate look at the most lovely of natural phenomena—with surprising insights about the origin of music.
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Customer Reviews
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A Must-Have Bird Book
By A1DK5H5R503UCG on 2005-04-30
This book is a hoot, a tweet, and a cheerup!
David Rothenberg has interwoven a personl journey of playing music with birds with a comprehensive history of bird song studies - from their poetic beginnings to their present scientific analysis. Because of his diverse talents, he is the perfect guide through these intellectual and musical forays.
Why do birds sing? There are many answers, but none are as satisfying as the relentless questioning in this book. I enjoyed it immensely and found it impossible to put down. I am sure you will enjoy it too.
Duetting with the Birds
By A3NTKLR3ZANIMP on 2005-05-21
Rothenberg writes with an easy intimacy, but if one takes him at his word, the intimacy that means most to him comes not by means of words but of music, and less by means of music as such than by an improvisatory exchange between, usually, himself on his clarinet, and someone else on whatever instrument the other person is using.
Given this driving urge, it seems inevitable that Rothenberg should want to cross the barrier between those most musical of creatures, the birds, and those with the most productive curiosity, the humans. His own curiosity leads him first to the birds and then to the human experts in birdsong. He gives vivid descriptions of these researchers' extraordinary devotion to their work. I especially enjoyed his description of the ability of the composer Olivier Messiaen to hear, transcribe, and whistle the complex songs of a bird he had never heard before.
Although, like a few of the researchers - Donald Kroodsma, for example - Rothenberg believes in the innate pleasure birds take in their song, he checks his intuitive sense of their muisicality by carefully summarizing what is scientifically known about their abilities and ways of life. Yet even though he takes to heart the criticism that the romantics "listened to birds and heard only themselves," he recalls that science, too, is fallible, and he plays on the ornithologists' conclusion that not only is each species of birds unique, but so is every individual bird.
"Why Birds Sing" ends in the climactic scene in which Rothenberg and a friend go to Australia to hear, see the dance of, and try to enter into a musical dialogue with the lyrebird named George, the only member, he says, of his elusive, musically gifted species who can stomach the sight and sound of human beings. The bird lights to sing just a few meters from Rothenberg's tape recorder. He hears that the lyrebird's song is composed but alien, in a human sens crazy, music. After he hears a full cycle of the lyrebird's music, he joins in, dancing, not to copy the bird's song, but to play music, in and around the song, that is worthy of the bird's acceptance. The bird seems to respond to the clarinet, dances, and disappears. Rothenberg develops this last, climactic chapter, which he calls "Becoming a Bird," with thoughtful eloquence. He feels he has given his gift and made his human offering to an animal of another singing species. But his gift is also to all of us who read him.
Unscientific and pretentious
By A2UX55EU3H6YZ9 on 2005-06-10
Rothenberg is a New Age writer and musician that enjoys playing music to birds and jamming their singing with the sound from different wind instruments. Surey lots of fun. However, it is from this perspective that he attemps to understand why birds sing. To be true, he does review some scientific papers and provides a not too bad coverage of the findings of the scientific literature. But Rothenberg enjoys exposing the shortcomings of this research (rather pretentiously by the way) and coming up with unscientific ideas of his own based on his feelings about why birds should spend so much time singing. He seriously believes that his empathic method of blowing desceding fifths and chromatic scales with his clarinet to singing birds can take him a long way into understanding the misteries of bird song. Good luck to him.
It's all about him
By A2KKD61IPLTFN7 on 2005-12-12
Steer clear of this pretentious unscientific book. It is an exercise in self-promotion for a mediocre musician who is using the subject of birdsong to effuse about the "wonders of nature" (and himself). There are much better books on this subject -- get "The Singing Life of Birds" by Donald Kroodsma instead.
Puts bird song stage center for musicians and all of us
By AXX67Z0IW6TTS on 2005-06-23
I really enjoyed it. And it is so full of goodies. Best for me is that not since Schafer's Tuning of the World has the whole complex of natural sound and the composer been put back up where it belongs, stage almost center. Mulling over the whole business, I just thought an alternate title might be: "what should humans sing?" And next most useful advice, to paraphrase you: "Take a tip from the Mockingbird." There's enough chock full in both those snippets to keep me creatively scratching my head.
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