麻豆传媒

WHEN I first started to listen to birdsong, it was like being given a new sense. For most people, birdsong is an agreeable soundtrack to a dog walk, a picnic, summer drinking, summer loving. It is the elevator music of the high spring: you are aware of it without being aware of it.

But then I learned the instruments of the orchestra, learned to tell one bird from another, learned to listen as well as to hear: and suddenly it was all quite different. The world, I mean. But how to respond?

A nightingale in full song. Response one: ah, yes. Luscinia megarhynchos. Singing from cover, as expected. Likes the coppicing, then. Note date, weather, time of day. Time the song. Analyse its constituent parts. Make a sonogram, compare it with other individuals. Compare the volume and variety of its song with its neighbour鈥檚, investigate differences in mating and breeding success鈥�and so on. Or you could remark: 鈥淢y heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk.鈥� Neither response is superior to the other. It鈥檚 all in the way these things take you.

Or you could respond as David Rothenberg does: whip out your clarinet and join in. Jam with the birds. You can hear him do it, too, on . It鈥檚 pretty funky.

And so is his book. Rothenberg asks the question: well, why do birds sing? Yes, we know it is about mating and territory, but why do they sing? The thing that bothers Rothenberg is that birdsong is more beautiful than it needs to be. Or to put it more objectively, more elaborate than it needs to be. Or, crucially for Rothenberg, far more musical than it needs to be. It鈥檚 almost as if they are enjoying themselves.

Have you ever watched jackdaws on a windy day? Instead of clinging to a perch and waiting for the whirling weather to pass, they get out and ride a Ferris wheel of air with scarcely a flap, just a subtle shaping and reshaping of the wing. There is no survival advantage conveyed by this behaviour: no food, no territory, no mate to win, no rival to be vanquished. It seems they ride the wind for the same reason that humans go surfing. Horses gallop about a field because it鈥檚 a nice day. A seagull glides the eddies and updraughts along a cliff edge for no apparent reason other than the love of flight.

And a bird sings 鈥� well, it sounds an awful lot as if the pure love of singing has something to do with it. As Rothenberg remarks, art and science converge here in mutual confusion: neither capable of finding the last word on the matter.

Rothenberg is a professor of philosophy and a jazz clarinettist. His trained mind loves the clarity and order that science seeks, but he also delights in the chaotic and the inexplicable. He is a science/art amphibian. In birdsong, he finds a subject that challenges both art and science. Art cannot explain the mind of the composer any more than science can: 鈥淪cience has not yet evolved to the point where it is able to calculate joy.鈥�

Humans are in some ways closer to birds than to mammals. Most mammals have an ethology of dung and urine obsession, living in the impenetrable world of smell. But birds are creatures of colour and sound, and we relate to them as like to like. A dog is in many ways more alien than a nightingale. If a dog wrote a novel, it would be in smell symbols, not sound symbols. Humans respond joyfully to the song of a nightingale. So, it seems, do nightingales. With birdsong, science answers half the question, art the other half, neither satisfactorily, and the two never really meet. If there is an answer, it lies in the listening.