We’ve been asked to follow in silence. It’s 11pm in Sussex woods. I’m in a line of people walking single-file following folk singer Sam Lee for a rare musical encounter. There’s a clear night sky and half-moon bringing a silvery burnish to the silhouetted trees. Walking this route about three hours ago before dusk, it was noisy with birdsong – dozens of calls including robin, song thrush, garden warbler, blackcap and cuckoo. Now it’s silent except for the occasional distant owl hoot.
The path narrows and becomes muddy, squelching with each step. The wood thins out into a coppiced area which is more open. That’s when we start to hear the nightingales in the distance. It’s only males that sing in their own territory, primarily to attract a mate.
After about 15 minutes, we stop beneath a line of trees. A nightingale is singing incredibly loudly, perhaps a metre above our heads. You feel you could touch it. But looking up, all you can see are the stars in the sky and the branches of the thicket on either side. The bird is invisible. A nightingale isn’t much to look at anyway – it’s a ‘little brown jobbie’ as birders say. But in the imagination it’s like a bright indication of spring: the sap rising from the earth, into the bluebells which are flowering, up the tree trunks and into the leaves and then bursting out in the darkness in a silvery torrent of song. Sam Lee calls the nightingale a ‘decorator of silence’.
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Although it’s famed for its song more than any other bird, it’s not a mellifluous outpouring of melody. The phrases come in short bursts. It’s as if it has two voices: one that is high, pure and melodic; the other low, guttural and raspy that interjects at random. The syrinx, which produces the song, has two separate voice boxes, each attached to a different lung-like wind sack.
After listening to the bird for many minutes, sometimes dialoguing with a more distant one, we hear a low drone on a cello – a warm sonic bed over which the nightingale sounds even more sparkly. But then the cellist, Matthew Barley, raises his pitch and starts imitating what the nightingale is doing. This is no mean feat given the quicksilver unpredictability of the song. But this strange musical meeting has a precedent.