Humpback Whale vs Bass Clarinet: Round Two

By David Rothenberg, Safina Center Fellow

“Man, that whale sounds more like a bass clarinet than you do,” said my oldest friend Adam. “You’re absolutely right,” I laughed. “Let me tell you why.”

He had been listening to this beautiful online feature presenting the musical qualities of the song of the humpback whale that appeared in the May issue of National Geographic, this past year:

The whale sings a note. Then I copy the whale. Then the whale. Then me again. With this cool dynamic interactive notation by Nat Geo artists Mesa Schumacher and Alberto Lopez, based on the an original graphic notation devised by Michael Deal and myself.

Ever since I wrote my book Thousand Mile Song: Whale Music in a Sea of Sound, in 2008, I had been trying to get National Geographic to do a story like this. Because I knew that in 1979, they included a ‘sound page’ in the back of one of their magazines, a flexible vinyl page that could be put on a turntable to offer up one short fragment of a humpback whale song, one of the most expressive examples of animal music known to humankind. Back then the magazine published so many copies in so many languages that this recording was and is the greatest single pressing of any record ever. They printed ten million copies at once.

So in our bean-counting, data-obsessed world one can reasonably say that humpback whales have sung one of the most popular songs ever. Multi-platinum, off the charts!

It’s the most popular recorded animal sound of all time. But is it music?

Out of the blue, forty-one years later, National Geographic calls me up and asks me to play bass clarinet along with a whale. “Fantastic,” I exclaimed. “Did you know I have been trying to get you guys to do this story for years?”

“Nah,” they mumbled, unimpressed. “We don’t know anything about that. But we need this recording of you playing exactly along with the whale by the end of the month.”

Easy, I thought. I’ve been playing along with whale songs for years. Just like when I play with birds, bugs, underwater pond lilies, I try not to copy what they do, but interact with them, create a music with them that neither human, animal, or plant could make alone. Make something together that no species would create apart.

So that’s what I did with the whale song. And it wasn’t what they wanted.

“No improvisation,” said the Nat Geo team. “Just play right with the whale. Exactly what he does. No funny business.” Sink… or swim.

Screenshot ©David Rothenberg

You see, they had a mission. To convince their skeptical readers that what the whale was singing was music, not that it could inspire music. So a human, playing a low, whale-friendly instrument like a bass clarinet, should ape the whale exactly with not flourish or new ideas. Just be the whale. Be the whale.

I had to record my part three times before it was close enough to the precise whale music score that I had provided to them. I was used to taking the score like a jazz chart, a place to begin, to inspire, to suggest. But now, at the behest of the biggest nature magazine in the world, I had to follow it exactly, note for note, more closely to the page that any singing male humpback whale himself would do.

So that, my friend, is why the whale sounds more like a bass clarinet than I do. 

He didn’t have to follow such instructions, he didn’t have to prove anything to the editorial board. He could wail like a whale!

And here I was, assigned with the task of proving to the readers of National Geographic that the humpback whale actually makes music, not noise.

The humpback whale emits “a series of surprisingly beautiful sounds,” wrote Roger Payne and Scott McVay in the pioneering cover story “Songs of Humpback Whales” in the journal Science in 1971:

They are certainly correct about this. And it is remarkable that no scientific paper since theirs has seen fit to call the humpback song ‘beautiful’ in the many decades since humans discovered the existence of said song. Scientists are taught not to use such subjective or value-laden language these days. It’s opening up a can of worms. Or a sea of whales, one way or another.

“You’ve highlighted the most important line in that paper,” said Scott McVay when I spoke to him over the phone when the National Geographic story came out. I felt that it was his triumph as well as mine (and the whales’) since it was he who got be interested in all this after I first met him at Paul Winter’s wedding long ago. For his work on whale song and his efforts to support conservation and animal advocacy as head of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, this year the Safina Center will be honoring Scott and his wife Hella for their many decades’ work on these important topics.

It was the beauty of the song of the humpback whale that put this great creature on the radar for the environmental movement, setting the tone for the Save the Whales movement which spread across the globe in the 1970s. McVay took a pile of records of The Song of the Humpback Whale and played them over national television in Japan to the captains of the whaling industry, who burst into tears exclaiming, “we didn’t know, we didn’t know.”

Returning from this journey, Scott McVay, poet as well as scientist, wrote these haiku-like lines:

These oceanic melodies led directly to the 1986 global moratorium on the hunting of whales for food and oil, a moratorium followed by most of the world’s nations with the exception of Japan, Norway, Iceland, Russia, and the Faroe Islands, along with special dispensation letting indigenous populations engage in traditional killing practices.

Beauty can and does make a difference. And I don’t mind holding in my own tendency to extrapolate, to improvise, to laugh, to cry.

But the whales will never hold back.

And that is why his song sometimes sounds more like music than mine.

Photos of and by Safina Center Fellow David Rothenberg.