The Ancient Musicians

By David Rothenberg, Safina Center Fellow

Now that winter is bearing down upon us, and the landscape turns gray and white, it is a good time to remember how loud and vibrant the summer was. Just a few months ago seems like an eternity. Or maybe yesterday, in this year when each day sometimes seems to blur in the fixity of our surroundings, as there is hardly anywhere we are still allowed to go.

A recent news story explains how tiny tree crickets use holes in leave to amplify their sounds to more impress their mates, a technique called ‘baffling’ that has got everyone smiling. No one can tell how small you are if you’ve got that giant sound, and some of the smallest insects can be the loudest.

Photo: Lewis Rapkin

Rachel Carson already wrote about a creature she called the ‘fairy bell ringer’ which she could never identify, though she knew it was some sort of insect. “It is exactly the sound that should come," she wrote, "from a bell held in the hand of the tiniest elf, inexpressibly clear and silvery, so faint, so barely-to-be-heard that you hold your breath as you bend closer to the green glades from which the fairy chirping comes.”

Photo: Lewis Rapkin

Experts from Lang Elliott to John Himmelman have narrowed it down to two possibilities, either the Say’s Trig or the Tinkling Ground Cricket. The first has a long resounding rapid ring, so loud it might be heard a quarter mile away. The second is more detached, maybe closer to a rhythmic repeating tiny bell. In his incredible book Cricket Radio, Himmelman, a children’s book writer, endeavored to record every single singing insect in the Eastern United States, and he put them all up online for you to listen to, with or without narration.

Photo: Lewis Rapkin

I’ve written plenty on the songs of insects as well, but last summer I decided instead, with the instigation of filmmaker Lewis Rapkin, to make a short live concert film performing live with insects, in the Hudson Valley environs both night and day. We filmed a series of live performances out in darkness and light, and had to deal with the amusing fact that the closer you get to a singing insect, the more they want to be silent, as long as they think you can see them. If they feel invisible, all the louder they will get.

Here’s the whole film for your consideration:

And here’s what it was like to make it:

We found some of the loudest ground crickets made their presence known singing right next to the tiny LOM microphones that we hid in the meadow, far from where I was playing along live with them, mixing iPad bug-like electronic sounds with clarinet.

Photo: Lewis Rapkin

One piece later appeared on this compilation album released to raise funds for the Xerces Society, the world’s premiere conservation organization for invertebrates. Although we might more easily think to help creatures that are big, beautiful, and magnificent, tiny insects are also beautiful, essential, and as I say in the film, “really old school, perhaps the oldest musicians we know on the planet.”

The more time you spend with these swirling and beguiling rhythms and textures, the more musical it all becomes. 

The winter may seem quiet and cold, but the expanding music of spring will be here before long, bringing with it, we hope, a newly optimistic world, full of possibility. 

I know I’ll be back out there listening as soon as I can.