“Our musicality has been inspired and evolved in accordance with birdsong” | Sam Lee and the musical inspiration of nightingales

“I wish my first kiss was as wonderful as hearing my first nightingale,” admits Sam Lee.

“Was it good for you?” I ask, side-stepping the messy details of the first kiss. “Yeah, it was mind-blowing. I want to compare it to the time that I first heard Mahalia Jackson or Billie Holiday, but I can’t because it was so different.”

Hearing that nightingale changed the folk singer’s life – first of all discovering songs and literature about the bird, then going out into nature to hear and perform with the birds in his Singing with Nightingales sessions. Now he’s written his first book, The Nightingale: Notes on a Songbird (Penguin).

“I was a little bit ashamed that I’d never heard it before,” Lee continues. “I knew the name of the bird so well, but had never heard it until I was 26 or 27. I found myself wondering why isn’t this part of ‘being human’ on the national curriculum?”

So I’m following Sam Lee’s curriculum and trudging with a small group of people in a line through the Sussex undergrowth trying to be as quiet as possible to a place where nightingales nest. It’s spring, yet there’s a dampness and chill in the air. I’m out of my comfort zone; it’s hard to see where I’m treading and I feel like an invader on another creature’s territory.

The name of the nightingale is famous – in poetry, song and the nicknames of singers. There’s Jenny Lind, the ‘Swedish nightingale’; MS Subbulakshmi, the ‘nightingale of India’; Bulbul (which means nightingale), the celebrated Azeri singer and several others named as such in the Turkic- and Persian-speaking worlds. Yet the bird itself is critically endangered in the UK with, according to the RSPB, only 6,700 breeding males.

The birds winter in sub-Saharan Africa – where they have no reputation for their song – and return to the UK mid-April to nest and breed. Nightingales are not much to look at – small, brown and just slightly larger than a robin. They sing to attract a mate, so their singing has to be as sensational, sparkling and seductive as it can be. Their singing season is about six weeks from mid-April to the end of May as, once they’ve mated, the singing stops.

Nightingales don’t live long, so for most of them their wooing song is a one-off experience. But some birds live for two seasons and research shows that, when they return, they favour songs that attracted them a mate before. It seems a sensible strategy – human singers like to recycle their greatest hits too. “I recently watched the Joan Armatrading bio documentary on BBC,” recalls Lee, “and it showed her at Celtic Connections, Glasgow, singing ‘Love and Affection’, as her grand finale. And she’s been singing that song for 40 years. That’s what keeps the crowds coming back to hear her and show some emotion. That’s what the old stars do. It’s not that birds are doing something similar to what humans are doing, but we’re doing something that these species have been doing forever. It’s working out what the peacock feather should look like that attracts the most mates. And that’s what’s created the nightingale song. This incredible niche is the birds’ intuitiveness to know what works.”

Back in Sussex, in the dark, we stumble across disused railway lines and down a narrow path to a tree where a nightingale is singing. There are several around, but they are territorial and so are spaced many metres apart. Sam Lee starts things off with some throat singing. This too is like entering another world. Over a guttural drone, spectral, almost bird-like tones shimmer and glisten in the night air. It feels like a magical ritual to initiate the process. “It’s a gentle way to start,” Lee says. “The harmonics in overtone singing are exquisite, delicate and pure. They are the closest that I can make that’s in the same realm as the nightingale. Each time we go to meet the bird, there’s a certain amount of permission-seeking that one has to start with to say ‘I’m coming to meet you on your terms’.”

The surprise, when the nightingale suddenly starts up again, is how much louder it is than Lee, who is singing quite softly and reverentially. We’re at the foot of a tree and it’s probably just a couple of metres above our heads, but it’s impossible to see in the dark. In the cool of night, the air condenses, becoming moist and ideal for conducting sound. So it uses this sonic advantage.

The song is bright, incandescent and comes in long and complex phrases. Most birds sing a repetitive motif, but the nightingale has a huge variety, although from time to time it does repeat patterns and certain notes, as if getting stuck in a groove. If you could see it, you’d expect to see sparks coming out of its throat. The second part of its scientific name, Luscinia megarhynchos, is Greek for ‘big beak’, which probably refers to its song count rather than its size.

The song is produced in the syrinx (Greek for panpipes) at the base of the bird’s trachea above its chest. I heard amazing birdsong one evening, which I was convinced must be a nightingale, but it turned out to be a blackbird. To an untrained ear they can sound quite similar. But Lee’s book informs me that the nightingale will regale us – or its prospective mate – with 250 different phrases and over 1,500 sounds in total. The blackbird has only 100.

‘It is 12 long months since first we met,

So early in the spring,

When the small birds they do whistle and

The nightingales do sing.’

These are the lyrics from ‘The Tan Yard Side’ on Lee’s debut album Ground of Its Own (2012), with a fulsome nightingale added to the track. On this and his next album, The Fade in Time, there are several tracks referring to birdsong, but not on his latest, Old Wow. “I think it’s become more implicit,” says Lee. “The nightingale work is there as an undercurrent throughout all the songs and the whole premise of the album.”

The album’s title was inspired by a buzzard, which suddenly appeared above him. “It just came out of nowhere and dropped down crying right over my head, swirling around me, just like a blessing. It was formidable and I was blown away. In that moment this name ‘Old Wow’ appeared. An expression of that vibrant, avian spirit and that magical entity like the God molecule that exists everywhere.”

Lee’s Singing with Nightingales project idea came out of a ludicrously eccentric escapade in which celebrated cellist Beatrice Harrison (who’d given the radio premiere of Elgar’s Cello Concerto) played alongside a nightingale in her garden in Oxted, Surrey. More than that, on May 19 1924 it was the first ever live outside-broadcast on the BBC. She played ‘Danny Boy’, some Dvořák and Elgar duetting with the nightingales. It was said that Harrison received 50,000 letters afterwards, some simply addressed to ‘The Lady of the Nightingales.’ When she met King George V, he said, “you have done something I have not been able to do. You have drawn the Empire closer together through the song of the nightingale and your cello.” She recorded what was supposed to be the nightingale’s favourite piece, Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘Chant Hindu’, in what became an annual event for several years on the BBC.

How can we tell what is the nightingale’s favourite piece? We certainly can’t know how they hear it. It’s thought birds’ brains have a much higher processing power than ours, so they can do everything much faster: fly swiftly through a thicket, sing and hear much faster. If you play a recording of a nightingale song at half speed it does become what we would call melodic with the decorative and ornamental qualities of a human singer. Which means that the slow ‘Chant Hindu’ must sound incredibly lugubrious to them, like a whale song. And everybody loves whale songs.

When you hear one of the Singing with Nightingales’ musicians duetting with the bird, they often sound completely disconnected, yet sometimes it sounds as if the bird is literally responding to what is being played. But can that be true? Or is that just our projection? Our imagination?

Lee has sung with nightingales often and heard dozens of musicians duet with them and is convinced there is a musical interaction. “I know that they respond and I’ve evidence to prove it,” he says. “They drop into the same key or adopt the same rhythm. I will always remember Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, the Hardanger d’amore fiddler from The Gloaming. He’s an Irish experimental musician who’s sort of left folk music behind because he wants to go into this other realm of experimental, expressive playing. Caoimhín’s such a curious, elfin and ethereal being and he played for the nightingale and they just spiralled off into outer space. And he was like, ‘I finally found a collaborator that I can really understand and play and work with’.”

“Actually I don’t think nightingales are necessarily paying attention to what’s being played, but they’re interested in the people. I like to think that with Beatrice Harrison, who was such a radical, alive spirit, the birds just adored her presence and she was on their wavelength. Sometimes a cat will always come to a certain person. It’s exactly the same with nightingales.”

A contemporary cellist, Matthew Barley, has been convinced by the nightingale experience. “As an improvisor, I know musicians who can play, but don’t listen,” he says. “I’m very used to listening out for a musical response. The cello has a huge range and I would imitate and expand on the phrases the nightingale was singing and then stop to see if the nightingale would respond. Maybe it’s a fantasy, but it certainly felt like a musical answer. Hearing that in the dark at 11pm at night was totally magical.”

Inevitably, when we are outside singing with nightingales, recalling first kisses and spiralling off into outer space, we start anthropomorphising these birds. Lee is unapologetic about that: “In no way will I say that anthropomorphising in this realm is a bad thing. If anything, I embrace it because to say it’s a bad thing to project humanness onto birds is to separate us and to say that we’ve nothing in common. Our musicality has been inspired and evolved in accordance with birdsong.”

In fact, the first part of Sam Lee’s book is about identifying with the nightingale and explaining why the bird has changed his life. “The bird singing unadorned in the raptured quiet of the night, so similar to my core practice when performing without any instrumentation, challenged me. The nightingale exemplifies the daring possibilities that many artists aspire to.”

Lee began his impressive career of song-collecting with Scottish Travellers Stanley Robertson and Elizabeth Stewart and, as he says in his book, it was like ‘discovering a meadow of thought-to-be extinct flowers that is soon to be ploughed over… I recorded as many of these elders as I could, drinking down the songs before the well ran dry, as it has almost done today, because most of these song carriers have now passed on.’ The parallel with the most celebrated singers in the ornithological world isn’t hard to see. Two ecosystems are rapidly disappearing. “In some ways it makes what you are hearing more exquisite, because it’s expressing the joy of living in the moment. There seems an impossibility of extinction when you’re in the presence of these ‘endlings’ as I call them. But then you step away and next year return back to the Traveller sites and there’s one less folk singer still living, or to the Gloucestershire woods and the nightingale population has halved. In their lives and in their journeys they have been singing one way or another for thousands of years and I’m being ambiguous of humans and birds here.”

In the UK, nightingales are only found in South-East England, mainly Suffolk, Essex, Kent and Sussex, and they’re on the UK’s Red List of Threatened Species (sadly, along with many others). Preventing their decline is part of a bigger conservation problem, as everything in the natural world is connected. But there’s no doubt that Singing with Nightingales is, as well as being an astonishing musical experience, an environmental campaigning activity. “I fell in love with the bird which led me on my journey of learning about what’s being lost,” Lee explains. “I let the proper campaigners do the conservation on an economic and policy level better than I ever could, but for me campaigning starts in the heart because you’ve got to turn people on and get their attention in a way that actually makes them care.”

With this in mind, hearing them loud in the Sussex countryside suddenly has other overtones. Instead of ebullience, joy and sparkle in their throats you start to hear the birds singing the sadness of their extinction.

This article originally appeared in the June 2021 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today