Consider the song of the nightingale. Clangorous, bizarre and almost psychedelic in its complexity, this small brown bird’s voice is truly remarkable but really nothing like the sweet, mellifluous crooning you might imagine if you’d never heard one for yourself. But few people these days have: the UK nightingale population, which now stands at around 5,000 pairs, has declined by half in the past three decades alone. Without a real-life reference point, the cliché of the nightingale’s superlative melodiousness seems destined to persist.
Composer Alexander Liebermann first encountered a nightingale returning home from a night out in Berlin. It would be many years before he began to incorporate birdsong in his music, but the experience stayed with him. I came across Liebermann on Instagram, where he posted a video of a drummer performing a transcription he’d made of a nightingale’s song. Untuned percussion might seem
