Nachtigall gives a whole disc to the song of the nightingale, Luscinia megarhynchos, recorded by Walter Tilgner. It was made during the nights of 14, 21 and 29 May 1983 in the thickets along the Reichenaudamm, the causeway to Reichenau Island in the Untersee part of Lake Constance. The material is laid out in two parts of 29 minutes each.
Tilgner is a German biologist and nature sound recordist, well known as a photographer of woodland and forest scenes. He was born in 1934 in Olomouc, then Czechoslovakia, grew up after 1945 on a farm near Hünfeld, and studied zoology and botany in Frankfurt in the 1950s. Until his retirement he worked at the natural history museum on Lake Constance in Konstanz, close to where this disc was recorded. For more than twenty years his main activity has been the documentary recording of natural sound, the making of what the label calls sound pictures. He is author and producer of more than ten Natural Sound CDs for Wergo. His recordings rely on digital technique and a dummy-head stereo microphone, which the label credits with sounds so lifelike that the listener seems to stand in the wood.
The first part presents nightingales at night, when the song of this shy bird carries on its own. The second moves to the early morning, as other birds wake and the dawn chorus gathers around the nightingales. The label calls the song precious and varied, and each part runs without a break for nearly half an hour.
The sleeve names the bird in five languages, Nachtigall, Nightingale, Rossignol Philomèle, Ruiseñor, with the Latin name first. Like the other volumes of the series, the disc was conceived to encourage listening to nature, and a walk among the trees with ears alert, as much as to document a species. Tilgner later became an honorary member of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology and of the Soundscape Forum Basel, two bodies devoted to the study of soundscapes.
CD, Wergo SM 9002-50, in the Natural Sound series, first published in 1987; Discogs describes this pressing as a reissue made in 2000 or later. Total time 58 minutes 10 seconds.
