Impermanence tea ceremony with special guest David Rothenberg
'Impermanence' is the current Forecast exhibition up at The Abbot, a gorgeous little gallery space on Abbot Kinney. David Rothenberg (bio below), an incredible Forecast Journal contributing musician/writer, is coming to visit from NY to speak at UCLA and has agreed to do an intimate performance with us this Saturday. We have decided to turn it into an intimate evening for only 20 people, where we will make tea and serve cake and biscuits and discuss what the impermanence of time means to each of you.
It’s free to attend. Come cuddle if you have the time and feel like relaxing around great art and friends.
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David Rothenberg has long been interested in the musicality of sounds made by inhabitants of the animal world. He has jammed live with lyrebirds, broadcast his clarinet underwater for humpback whales, and covered himself in thirteen-year cicadas to wail away inside a wash of white noise.
Rothenberg presents a musical trajectory through several of his favorite species, revealing their distinct and evolved aesthetic senses in an attempt to show that music can reach across species lines, from human to animal, and back. Creatures whose musical worlds we will enter include the thrush nightingale, humpback whale, three-humped treehopper, snowy tree cricket, seventeen-year cicada, white-crested laughing thrush, superb lyrebird, European marsh warbler, and his latest obsession, the secret sounds of ponds.
Musician and philosopher David Rothenberg wrote Why Birds Sing, Bug Music, Survival of the Beautiful and many other books, published in at least eleven languages. He has more than forty recordings out, including One Dark Night I Left My Silent House which came out on ECM, and most recently In the Wake of Memories and Faultlines. He has performed or recorded with Pauline Oliveros, Peter Gabriel, Ray Phiri, Suzanne Vega, Scanner, Elliott Sharp, Umru, Iva Bittová, and the Karnataka College of Percussion. In 2024 he won a Grammy Award as part of For the Birds, in the category of Best Boxed Set. Whale Music and Secret Sounds of Ponds are his latest books. Nightingales In Berlin is his latest film. Rothenberg is Distinguished Professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.