David Rothenberg (US)

Musician and philosopher David Rothenberg is 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 Thousand Mile Song (Basic Books), about making music with whales, has been the subject of several documentary films in French and German.

As a musician, Rothenberg has performed and recorded with Jan Bang, Scanner, Glen Velez, Suzanne Vega, Peter Gabriel, Ray Phiri, Pauline Oliveros, Benedicte Maurseth, and the Karnataka College of Percussion. His latest major label music CD, One Dark Night I Left My Silent House, a duet with pianist Marilyn Crispell, came out on ECM in 2010. Rothenberg’s book, Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science, and Evolution was published in 2011. Bug Music, came out 2013, along with a CD of the same name featuring music made out of encounters with the entomological world. His latest book, CD, and film is Nightingales in Berlin, published in 2019. Rothenberg has been profiled on Radiolab and in the New Yorker. He has more than thirty CDs out under his own name.

Rothenberg is a distinguished professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.