On Creating Music with the Animal World

• This is a live online conversation with audience Q&A. Registration includes livestream access and ad-free replay.

Musician and philosopher David Rothenberg has a lifelong quest to make music that no one species can create alone. This calling has led him to compose and play music with nightingales, humpback whales, seventeen-year cicadas, and the mysterious rhythms of underwater plants. While actively exploring new genres of music from around the world and seeking ever more far-flung musical and scientific collaborators, David’s practice straddles music, philosophy, and an alternative vision for our future.

Join David for an inspiring conversation with CIIS faculty Jennifer Wells exploring how practices like making multispecies music can inspire cultural, aesthetic and spiritual richness for our collective pathways forwards.

Photo Credit: Andrea Galvani

David Rothenberg is a musician, philosopher and the author of Why Birds Sing (Basic Books and Penguin UK), also published in Italy, Spain, Taiwan, China, Korea, and Germany. In 2006 it was turned into a feature-length TV documentary by the BBC. Rothenberg has also written Sudden Music, Blue Cliff Record, Hand’s End, and Always the Mountains. His writings have appeared in at least eleven languages. His book Whale Music (Terra Nova/MIT Press), about making music with whales, came out in February 2023, Secret Sounds of Ponds in 2024. He has more than forty recordings out, including One Dark Night I Left My Silent House which came out on ECM, and more recently Just Leave It All Behind and Lost Steps. He has performed or recorded with Pauline Oliveros, Peter Gabriel, Ray Phiri, Suzanne Vega, Scanner, Elliott Sharp, Umru, Iva Bittová, and the Karnataka College of Percussion. In 2024 he won a Grammy Award as part of For the Birds, in the category of Best Boxed Set. Nightingales In Berlin and Eastern Anthems are his latest films. His piece Eleven Paths to Animal Music premiered at the Sammlung Hoffmann in Berlin in 2025. Rothenberg is Distinguished Professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. www.davidrothenberg.net

Jennifer Wells researches human ecology and social change. Her research aims at bringing uplifting and imaginative responses to the growing poly-crisis. Wells has degrees from Yale, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Sorbonne, Paris IV. Since 2020, she has been a Visiting Scholar at the Sorbonne, Paris I, Center for Contemporary Philosophy and the Institute of Legal and Philosophical Sciences, in Paris, France. Her last book was the internationally recognized Complexity and Sustainability (Routledge 2014). She previously co-authored a book on the emerging biosciences, funded by and written for the Ford Foundation. She also helped to found and develop a writing and arts retreat center on an organic farm in Colebrook, Connecticut. Wells has a passion for new emergent sciences, humanities and arts, such as recent research in animal and plant intelligence and the environmental humanities.

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