The Nightingale’s Song - An Interview with Sam Lee
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The Nightingale’s Song - An Interview with Sam Lee (Emergence Magazine)
EMYour, I guess, project, this ongoing project that you have of singing with nightingales, as far as I understand it, it started by your desire to honor an encounter with a cellist and a nightingale earlier on in the history of recorded music and radio, in 1924, with this very famous British cellist, Beatrice Harrison. I wonder if you could share that story and talk a little bit about Beatrice and what she did.
SLMmm, absolutely. She’s a very incredible woman. I should kind of contextualize that by saying she was around in the 1920s, which is relatively modern in the history of where music and nightingales have existed. There’s a long international legacy of that, but she is our British kind of apocryphal tale of where the nightingale came into popular consciousness. And it happened because as a darling society character, she was the muse of Elgar. She played the premier of Elgar’s Cello Concerto. She was friends with royalty. She was real out there on the scene and a real pioneer of women’s rights as well. And she convinced the BBC much against their judgment to try out some new broadcasting equipment that would allow microphones to be small enough to take outside of the studio. And so on the 19th of May, 1924, the BBC—brand new at that point and internationally broadcasting—broke into one of their concerts and stopped to say, “We have a broadcast from the thicket of her back garden down south of London,” where a mile of cable linking up to the telephone exchange brought the song of the nightingale singing that night with her on her cello improvising and playing some pieces. And it was a viral sensation. You know, it was the ultimate first in that kind of, yeah, media experience that traveled around the world. Millions of people listened to it; fifty thousand people wrote letters in to the BBC to say, “Please, can we have more?” And she became this figure—this lady of the nightingales—and every year she did this broadcast, and she sold millions of records. And she traveled the world and would play the Carnegie Hall several times a year and invite all the Americans to come to her home in Oxted and have tea with her and listen to her nightingale, which they did in the thousands. Literally, you know, tankers of humans came over across the sea to hear her nightingale. She really brought that kind of popular appreciation and did a lot in terms of the preservation of birds and, you know, the popularization of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, our big charity. So she’s a—she’s a formidable figure but what she did was bring art and the nightingale together.