Since 2007, amateur (and less amateur) astronauts have been vying to land a privately funded spacecraft on the moon, in response to a challenge from Google and the nonprofit XPrize, which incentivizes “radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity.” In this case, twenty million dollars goes to the first team to traverse the two hundred and thirty-eight thousand miles there and back, and to collect high-definition images and video en route. A team from Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute secured $1.75 million in seed money from Google, and is planning to launch its rover later this year. Engineers have reserved six ounces of payload space for an artifact called the MoonArk, which will be deposited on the moon’s surface and has been described as “a deep human gift and gesture for the Moon.” Twelve people have walked on the moon since 1969. Whether the MoonArk will await discovery by additional humans, or by some adventuring extraterrestrial consciousness—well, who knows.
One of the cultural relics included on the MoonArk is a song: a three-minute-and-twenty-second recording of a nightingale, made in Bremen, Germany, in 1913, by Karl Reich. Reich was something of a savant, a shopkeeper who bred and recorded canaries and other birds. He reportedly trained one nightingale to hop inside the horn of a gramophone so that he could collect a higher-fidelity recording of its voice. In the nineteen-tens, the Victor Talking Machine Company began commercially issuing Reich’s birdsongs on 78-r.p.m. records—two-sided shellac discs that contained about three minutes of music per side—across Europe, Russia, the United States, and Australia.
[audio url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/274239603"]
Ian Nagoski, a producer and music researcher who lives in Baltimore and operates a record label called Canary Records, selected Reich’s piece for inclusion on the MoonArk. I first met Nagoski in 2011, when I was reporting a book on collectors of rare 78-r.p.m. records. I admired the compilations he had produced of often-ignored immigrant material from the early twentieth century: Greek, Turkish, Balkan, and Kurdish folk music, recorded in America and sold, successfully, to the diaspora.
Nagoski’s instinct as a collector, as far as I could tell, was to ask questions of the records that nobody else was very interested in, either because they weren’t particularly rare or because the music they contained didn’t quite jibe with the Zeitgeist. Whereas an obscure country-blues 78 in playable condition might trade privately for tens of thousands of dollars, a birdsong record can often be had for a buck. In fact, birdsong records were pressed in such large numbers that anyone prone to burrowing into piles of 78s in junk shops or at flea markets has likely come across one: either a field or aviary recording of an actual bird caught mid-song, a bird song entwined with a bit of sentimental chamber music, or, on occasion, a grown human pretending to be a bird.
That last category, in particular, intrigued Nagoski. Around the start of the twentieth century, animal-imitation records were their own little subgenre, an oddball relic of a period in which the recording industry was still so nascent and bewildering, executives were down to try anything once. Who could have known, yet, what people might want to listen to in their homes?
“Ecstatic and Wingless: Bird Imitation on Four Continents, 1910-44,” Nagoski’s most recent project for Canary Records, is one of the only compilations of its kind. It contains both actual and imitation birdsongs, always unaccompanied, and was released digitally in late 2015. It is a terrifically strange listen, in part because the genesis of certain tracks—this lilting, disembodied melody, is it avian or human?—can begin to feel troublingly unclear. (While we might think of our enjoyment of a birdsong as passive, the birds, of course, do listen back: budgerigars, European starlings, hill mynas, corvids, superb lyrebirds, mockingbirds, Abyssian lovebirds, parakeets, and cockatoos, they mimic, too. They find a way into our customs and sounds. In 2006, an African gray parrot named Einstein even delivered a TED talk while being fed a steady stream of sunflower seeds by a handler. She occasionally relieved herself from her perch.)
Last year, Nagoski was approached by a member of the MoonArk crew about contributing a birdsong to their project, and, after a brief period of existential hand-wringing, he chose “Song of a Nightingale,” in part because he believes that nightingales are “simply the best avian singers on earth.” He does not equivocate on this point. “Their songs are incredibly varied and gorgeous and seem to permutate constantly. And when they get going, they will sing ALL NIGHT LONG,” he wrote to me recently, in an e-mail. “They seem to embody a combination of beauty and desperation. And so, for thousands of years, they became the greatest symbols of the impassioned lover, the romantic, the great poet, the one who simply cannot help but sing, from whom melodies of devotion to its mate seem to flow endlessly in a constant masterpiece of melodic invention.”
Keats, in his “Ode to a Nightingale,” figures the bird as a symbol of our physical and spiritual frailty. The poem is uncharacteristically grim, even for 1819. Pleasure cannot last; death comes for us all. A stanza:
For Keats, the nightingale’s song encapsulates all the great metaphysical hazards of being alive. You will love things, and they will disappear. You, too, will disappear.
Present in the nightingale’s voice—and you can hear it clearly on “Song of the Nightingale”—is some inherent tenuousness. The bird’s song is not ethereal, exactly, but it does seem to contain information regarding its own demise. Pliny the Elder, the author of “Historia Naturalis,” from 77 A.D., one of the first ancient texts written on the natural world, also heard something unmistakably high-stakes in birdsong: he believed that when birds sang directly to each other they were engaged in a to-the-death duel. “The loser often ends her life by dying, her breath giving out before her song,” he wrote. Pliny’s observations were not scientifically sound—not even close—but I understand how he arrived there. The yearning conveyed in a nightingale’s song feels like the kind that ultimately undoes its keeper.
Nagoski tossed out a few other reasons why bird recordings were so popular. Long-distance travel was fairly arduous and expensive in 1920, and perhaps these were birds not everyone could hear where she lived. (“So, in the English-speaking world, many thousands of literate people who had read hundreds of poems on the subject of the beauty of nightingale songs may have never gotten to hear one before,” he wrote.) The recordings were likely shared and discussed among bird-fanciers. They sounded pretty. And, most crucially, they could be a potent engine of nostalgia, reminding us of different seasons or different places, now rendered out of time—they evoked poems, songs, that one morning in the meadow, what have you. “They’re sentimental and fit into the hygienic sentimentality that spilled over in the early twentieth century from the Victorian period,” Nagoski said.
Musically, birdsongs can also be terrifically complex; they’ve inspired classical musicians for centuries. Perhaps most famously, the French composer Olivier Messiaen sought, recorded, and then notated birdsongs for his compositions, eventually building an entire orchestral piece, “Le Réveil des Oiseaux,” or “The Awakening of the Birds,” exclusively from birdsong (thirty-eight different species are cited within it).
But I still suspect that the appeal is largely extra-musical—something about how a bird’s song emerges unbidden from the wood. It’s a little like encountering a blooming flower so exquisite you can’t quite believe it’s real, although you also know, on some deep level, that it is the most real thing you’ve seen in a while. In the liner notes to “Ecstatic and Wingless,” Nagoski quotes Royal Dixon, an author and early animal-rights activist: “It is strange indeed that so few human beings are yet aware of the divine psalmistry of the birds.” The quote is from Dixon’s 1917 book, “The Human Side of Birds.” He continues, “We pay large sums to hear concert music, and we never stop to think that the pieces are only the musician’s ideal of some aspect of nature. In his complex civilization man has grown away from accord with the world of the wild things, and he cannot give its essence so truly as his feathered brother of the air. Birds render in their music the glorious spirit of the universe as it really is, and will ever be.”
Dixon would be pleased to know that, soon enough, “Song of a Nightingale” will sit on the surface of the moon, and a bird will speak for the human condition. The big question Nagoski was trying to answer with his MoonArk task—What best summarizes the experience of being a person alive on this planet?—is the same big question that fuels nearly all of our creative, philosophical, and spiritual endeavors. That we might find it answered by a bird is both extraordinary and not.
