Call and Response ~ The Nightingale Collaboration

Michael Davitt

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Nov 3, 2020
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THE ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE

Written by John Keats in 1819, soon after the death of his brother Tom, whom he had loved devotedly and nursed to the end. He was feeling keenly the tragedy of a world "where youth grows pale, and specter thin, and dies". The song of a nightingale, made him long to escape with it from this world of realities and sorrows to the world of ideal beauty, which it seemed to him somehow to stand for and suggest. He thought not of the nightingale as an individual bird, but of its song, which had been beautiful for centuries and would continue to be beautiful long after his generation had passed away and the thought of this undying muse, he contrasted bitterly with our feverishly sad and short life. When, by the power of imagination, he had left the world behind him and was absorbed in the vision of beauty roused by the bird's song, he longed for death rather than a return to disillusionment.

The nightingale experiences a type of death but does not actually die. Instead, the songbird is capable of living through its song, which is a fate that humans cannot expect. The poem ends with an acceptance that pleasure cannot last and that death is an inevitable part of life.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

"Ode to a Nightingale" describes a series of conflicts between reality and the romantic ideal of uniting with nature. In the words of Richard Fogle, "The principal stress of the poem is a struggle between ideal and actual: inclusive terms which, however, contain more particular antitheses of pleasure and pain, of imagination and common sense reason, of fullness and privation, of permanence and change, of nature and the human, of art and life, freedom and bondage, waking and dream."

And so we come to the story of a wonderful English cellist Beatrice Harrison. Harrison was a cellist of some note in Britain. She had given several first performances of the compositions of Delius, and was closely associated with Elgar’s Cello Concerto.

May 19th 1924 was the first day radio listeners heard a cello playing while nightingales sang, live from a Surrey garden. The cellist was Beatrice Harrison, who had recently performed the British debut of Delius's Cello Concerto, which had been written for her.
The nightingales were the birds in the woods around Harrison's home in Oxted, England who were attracted by the sound of her cello.

Harrison first became aware of the birds one summer evening as she practiced her instrument in the garden. As she played she heard a nightingale answer and then echo the notes of the cello. One night, she was playing a scale and . . . a nightingale joined in. At first, she couldn’t believe it. She started playing a sonata, and the nightingale accompanied her. It happened again the next night and next night. Miss Harrison was so excited about it, she went to the BBC and told them all about it. Harrison contacted John Reith, the chairman of the BBC, with a suggestion that he broadcast the event. Reith was initially dubious but he allowed himself to be convinced.

Harrison persuaded the BBC that it should be broadcast. BBC engineers P. Eckersley and A. West set up the equipment at her home. What made the experiment possible, most notably was the use of the Marconi-Sykes Magnetophone.
Previously microphones had been rudimentary “repurposed telephone mouthpieces”, but the Marconi-Sykes Magnetophone was beginning to revolutionize radio. It was a microphone sensitive enough to pick up sounds which had confused engineers until they realized they were insects and birds. Suddenly radio and recording had become broad-spectrum. From the Harrison home, the amplified signal from the Marconi-Sykes traveled via the telephone lines to be broadcast from the central BBC station in London.

Engineers were determined to test BBC’s first ever "Outside Broadcast " and the following night heavy tubed equipment was carried into Miss Harrison’s garden. She started to play, and they waited and, um waited . . . and at last, the nightingale began to sing.
It went on for about 15 minutes… rising and falling with the cello.

But . . . the really extraordinary thing is that . . .other people who’d been listening to the broadcast in their gardens or windows open reported that other nightingales also started to sing, it was . . . it was wonderful.

The public reaction was such, that the experiment was repeated the next month and then every spring for the following 12 years. Harrison and the nightingales became internationally renowned and she received 50,000 fan letters. Writing in the Radio Times before the second broadcast, BBC Managing Director John Reith said the nightingale: "Has swept the country... with a wave of something closely akin to emotionalism and a glamour of romance has flashed across the prosaic round of many a life."

Wouldn't it improve our quality of life, if every man, woman and child in the UK could hear at least one nightingale sing, every spring?
If you agree, please sign my petition asking the BBC to broadcast nightingale song live. Perhaps Lord Reith, famous first leader of the BBC thought so, for on May 18th 1924, a singing nightingale in a Surrey wood (with a famous cellist playing along) was the centerpiece of the BBC’s first ever "Outside Broadcast ". It was by wireless of course, and as any birdwatcher knows, there is little point in trying to see a nightingale but every point in making the effort to hear one.

An estimated one million people tuned in to that first broadcast. The BBC and the cellist, Beatrice Harrison, were deluged with fan letters of appreciation. So popular was the nightingale broadcast that thousands of people joined organized trips to the Surrey woods to hear the birds.

The BBC repeated the broadcast each May, until it was stopped in mid-broadcast in 1942, during the Second World War. The recording was made on May 19th 1942 by a BBC sound engineer, intending to capture the nightingale's song, also by accident, recorded the sound of RAF bombers on their way to attack Mannheim, Germany. The sound of that wartime bird, recorded but never transmitted, captured the ominous sound of RAF bombers gathering overhead. It is one of the most haunting, most evocative things I have ever heard. The broadcast was interrupted so as not to alert the Germans that the attack was under way.


Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music ~ Do I wake or sleep?

ODE TO A NIGHTINGALE
~ John Keats (1890)

 

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