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Copyright

Fatima Lahham;

Published On

2025-04-30

Page Range

pp. 97–122

Language

  • English

Print Length

26 pages

3. Improvising Nature

Transposable Tongues of the Nightingale

  • Fatima Lahham (author)
Chapter of: Improvising Otherwise: A Decolonial Feminist Approach to Improvisation in Early Modern English Culture(pp. 97–122)
This chapter explores the role of improvisation in cultural understandings of the nightingale, building on narratives of embodied improvisation and improvisation as encounter, reading cross-cultural encounters through the bodies of improvising birds and identifying discourses of gender, coloniality and their intersections. By listening to stories of the nightingale in Ovid’s tragic myth as well as in Sufi poetry where the bird is paired with a rose, the chapter makes connections between the nightingale’s transposable tongues and identities, asking what these multi-layered histories can offer the historian, birder and improvising musician today.

Contributors

Fatima Lahham

(author)
https://fatimalahham.com/

Fatima Lahham (b.1993) is a musician and researcher with interests across musical improvisation, feminist methodologies, early modern historiographies, and music and healthcare. After studies at Oxford University and the Royal College of Music in London, she received an AHRC studentship to support her PhD research at the University of Cambridge. Since then she has held academic positions at the Royal College of Music and Royal Holloway, University of London, and is currently employed as a researcher at Nordoff & Robbins, the UK’s largest music therapy charity. Fatima performs widely as a recorder player across baroque music, Arabic music and various improvisatory settings. Her solo album 'bulbul' (2022) has been followed by several singles and she also works as a community musician.