Thousand-Mile Song: Whale Music in a Sea of Sound - Softcover

David Rothenberg is Professor of Philosophy and Music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and the author of books including Why Birds Sing. His articles have appeared in Parabola, The Nation, Wired, Dwell, and Sierra. He lives in Cold Spring, New York.

*Starred Review* “Maybe music is part of nature itself”—a hypothesis philosopher and musician Rothenberg has put to the test in his quest to create interspecies music. He recapped his avian adventures in Why Birds Sing (2005) and now recounts his far more complicated meetings with whales. A warmly inquisitive writer who makes technical information as entertaining as tales about nude whale watchers, Rothenberg tells remarkably dramatic and funny stories of his musical encounters with whales in Chicago, British Columbia, Hawaii, and Karelia, Russia (a breathtaking CD accompanies the book). He also revisits a neglected chapter of the environmental movement: the electrifying impact of the first recordings of the haunting songs of humpback whales released in 1970. Rothenberg meticulously analyzes the “long, epic rhymes” of the humpbacks, “sperm whale click trains,” and the “cacophonous free jazz of belugas and the kinship whistles of orcas,” explaining how whale songs change, travel great distances, and embody emotion. Rothenberg’s unique study is particularly sharp in its analysis of the mysticism whales evoke and the findings and blind spots of scientific inquiries. As he rekindles whale awe, Rothenberg calls for a revitalized commitment to protecting these “great singers of the sea.” --Donna Seaman