A nightingale sang in berkeley square full#
A nightingale sang in berkeley square free#

The Owl and the Nightingale is, then there’s Shakespeare and Keats and Coleridge. He said: “Pliny the Elder describes nightingale song perfectly 2,000 years ago. The film-maker Luke Massey, who arranged the live art event with ATM, is making a documentary about the decline of the nightingale. We have to start celebrating these species and the arts are a very important way of brokering awareness and creating an agency for change.” He added: “At this rate we’re going to lose our nightingales, and so many species are in massive decline. Lee said it would be “a celebratory finale after the end of the Extinction Rebellion”, referring to the climate protests that blockaded junctions in London over the past two weeks.

A nightingale sang in berkeley square free#

On Monday evening, Lee will rework the classic song A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square at a free Extinction Rebellion event in the square, after which the audience will be encouraged to disperse through the streets of London with the nightingales’ song playing on their phones.

A nightingale sang in berkeley square full#

Its song is absolutely full of indulgence and decadence and serenity and sexuality and pleasure and connection and commonality.” “It’s an animal that is so utterly at one with music and the environment and using all the tropes and articulation and emotional capacity of a human musician, in the shape of a tiny brown feathered being. Lee said the nightingale was the most inspiring of musicians. On Monday evening, folk singer Sam Lee will rework Vera Lynn’s classic song A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square at a free Extinction Rebellion event in the square. Musicians including the harpist Serafina Steer and Cosmo Sheldrake played alongside nightingales singing at the nature reserve. Lee, who helped edit the RSPB single, is in the midst of a nightingale tour, with a sold-out festival in Fingringhoe Wick, Essex, on Saturday attracting more than 100 people travelling on free buses from London. They have a repertoire of 200 phrases and they surprise you all the time.” “With a nightingale you never know what’s going to come next. “When you’re out in the English countryside in spring and the blackthorn is in blossom, the nightingale’s song is just the most fantastic sound to listen to,” said ATM. The BBC continued this annual tradition until 1942, when the broadcast was famously abandoned when microphones picked up the sound of Wellington and Lancaster bombers en route to attack Germany, and the radio engineers realised the sounds could forewarn Hitler. In 1924, the BBC’s first live-to-radio broadcast featured the cellist Beatrice Harrison playing a duet with a nightingale recorded in her garden in Surrey. Its song was played in Berkeley Square as ATM painted a nightingale on the tailplane of a Wellington bomber at an event organised by the makers of a new documentary, The Last Song of the Nightingale. Romantic poets from John Keats to Samuel Taylor Coleridge feted this unobtrusive brown bird’s astonishing musicality.

The modest-looking nightingale’s remarkable, mostly nocturnal song has inspired writers ever since it was described by Pliny the Elder several thousand years ago. Let Nature Sing, a track of pure birdsong including the nightingale, has been released by the RSPB to highlight the loss of more than 40 million birds from the UK in 50 years. Birdsong was played on phones on Friday as the street artist ATM spent the day painting a nightingale in a gallery on the square, and more than 750 people attended a concert on Monday, when the folk singer Sam Lee and other musicians will duet with amplified nightingale song.