Have you ever gotten lost in sound? This week, Juliana speaks with David Rothenberg who is a musician, composer, author, and philosopher-naturalist who performs music with a diverse cast of animals. They discuss perceptions of time, cicadas, whale songs, and the life of an artist.
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Conversations with Animals is a monthly podcast hosted by Juliana examining our interconnection with nonhuman animal lives. Expect interviews with ecological writers, filmmakers, vegan chefs, animal-related spaces, artists, and more! Each month, a fresh companion newsletter is published. Subscribe: www.julianaroth.com/drawinganimals
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David Rothenberg has written and performed on the relationship between humanity and nature for many years. He is the author of Why Birds Sing, on making music with birds, also published in England, Italy, Spain, Taiwan, China, Korea, and Germany. It was turned into a feature length BBC TV documentary. His following book, Thousand Mile Song, re-released this month, is on making music with whales. It was turned into a film for French television.
Rothenberg has a podcast series called Soundwalker. His latest streamed concerts are on his Youtube channel. His 2020 releases include In the Wake of Memories, with Wassim Mukdad and Volker Lankow, and They Say Humans Exist, with Jacob Young and Sidiki Camara, named best jazz album of the year by Stereo+ Magazine in Norway. He is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, which has encouraged and supported all of his creative projects since 1992.
A recent article on Rothenberg’s cicada work appeared in the New York Times, along with an interactive feature on his whale music in National Geographic.
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Juliana is a writer, filmmaker, educator, and performer. She formerly lived as a volunteer on an organic farm in Maine, out of a backpack in the wilderness of Utah’s La Sal Mountains, and worked for the Ecology Center. She was selected as a VIDA Fellow with the Sundress Academy for the Arts for her fiction. Her writing appears in The Breakwater Review, Irish Pages, Los Angeles Review of Books as well as being produced as independent films that she directs. Her web series, The University, was nominated by the International Academy of Web Television for Best Drama Writing and screened at survivor justice nonprofits across the country. Her new film, Final Curtain Call, inspired by the life of Radio City Music Hall's Chief Organist, is currently screening at film festivals. She teaches writing at NYU and is an Emerging Writer Fellow at the Center for Fiction.
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Whale song with David Rothenberg