Event Host: Humanities Institute
Short Description: 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.
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.
For more information about Rothenberg, visit the Humanities Institute.
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.
