Species,

species, unite, unite.

I really felt like I turned into a bird the way I was playing was changed like I played

the way you wouldn't nobody would play a clarinet unless they had spent weeks listening to nightingales. Hi, I'm Elizabeth Novigrats. This is Species Unite. We have a favor to ask if you like today's

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This conversation is with David Rothenburg. Amongst many other things David is an inner species musician.

That means he plays music with whales and with birds and with insects and with all sorts of

nature around him.

He's also a writer. He's written many books including Why Birds Sing,

Whale Music, and Nightingales in Berlin, which was also made into a film and he is a professor of philosophy

and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. So before I learned about you, I didn't know anybody was an interspecies musician. I didn't

even know that it existed as an art. It really made me wonder like when you were a kid but this is this something

you thought about or like did you know of about it? When I was a kid my parents

moved us from like the upper west side to Connecticut and I was a kid my parents moved us from like the upper west side to Connecticut and I also kind of didn't have any friends and wandering in the woods talking to myself alone and I started paying attention to nature a lot and like really wanting to wander in the woods and such but it was in high school

when I heard there actually was a musician in Connecticut who played music with wolves and

Wales named Paul Winter and he didn't live that far from me he's a saxophonist he's in his 80s now

So I heard about this this sounds kind of cool. I want to meet this guy it turned out that in the Westport school of music there's a cellist teaching there who played in Paul Winter's group.

And both of us got thrown out of this school around the same time. He was thrown out for teaching too much improvisation was

kind of conservative place and I was thrown out for snickering at the owner who

I found kind of you know pretentious and like you're not showing enough respect out,

...