chemistry

Insects in music

Insects in music is a chemistry topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Insects in music rather than just read about it. In short: Insects have appeared in music from Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee" to such popular songs as "Blue-tailed Fly" and the folk song "La Cucaracha" which is about a cockroach. Insect groups mentioned include bees, ants, flies and the various singing insects such as cicadas, crickets, and beetles, while other songs refer to bugs in general.

Key takeaways

Insects in music belongs to chemistry; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Insects in music to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Insects in music from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Insects have appeared in music from Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumblebee" to such popular songs as "Blue-tailed Fly" and the folk song "La Cucaracha" which is about a cockroach. Insect groups mentioned include bees, ants, flies and the various singing insects such as cicadas, crickets, and beetles, while other songs refer to bugs in general.

Overview

Insects including bees, cicadas, crickets and grasshoppers produce sounds, whether by flying or by stridulation, attracting human interest. Insect sounds have accordingly been the inspiration for a variety of forms of music. Among Western composers, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov imitates the quick buzzing vibrato of the bumblebee in his famous "Flight of the Bumblebee"; Edvard Grieg was inspired by flies in his Said the Gadfly to the Fly. Popular songs with an insect theme include "The Glow-Worm", "Poor Butterfly", "La Cucaracha", "The Boll Weevil", and "The Blue-Tailed Fly". Operas like Puccini's Madama Butterfly and Albert Roussel's ballet Le Festin de l'araignée (The Spider's Feast similarly reference arthropods. Pop groups named after insects include Buddy Holly and The Crickets, The Beatles, Adam and the Ants and many others. And some fictional crickets in Western popular culture, like Jiminy Cricket and Cri-Cri have been known to sing.

In classical music The French Renaissance composer Josquin des Prez, working in Italy, wrote a piece in the style of a frottola entitled El Grillo (lit. 'The Cricket'). It is among the most frequently sung of his works.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov wrote "Flight of the Bumblebee" as an orchestral interlude for his opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan, composed in 1899–1900. The piece closes act 3, tableau 1, during which the magic Swan-Bird changes Prince Gvidon Saltanovich (the Tsar's son) into a bumblebee so that he can fly away to visit his father, who does not know that he is alive. The piece is one of the most recognizable in classical music. The fast pace of the music has given rise to its mass appeal, as well as making it difficult to play. Musicians have risen to the challenge by setting world records for the fastest performance on guitar, piano and violin.

The Canadian violinist Eric Speed broke the record for the fastest performance of the "Flight of the Bumblebee" at the "Just For Laughs" festival in Montreal on 22 July 2011, playing the piece in 53 seconds. The song has a direct connection to martial arts master Bruce Lee, who starred on the radio program Green Hornet. "Flight" was the show's theme music, blended with a hornet buzz created on a theremin. The play upon which the opera was based – written by Alexander Pushkin – originally had two more insect themes: the Flight of the Mosquito and the Flight of the Fly. Neither was made into musical pieces. One was made into an illustration for the original publication. Béla Bartók's bizarrely empathetic piece, "From the Diary of a Fly, for piano" (Mikrokosmos Vol. 6/142), attempts to depict the actions of a fly caught in a cobweb, from the fly's perspective—i.e., as related from his diary. The buzzing sounds signify the fly's desperation to escape. The middle section of the Adagio religioso movement in Bartók's 1945 Piano Concerto No. 3 contains imitations of natural sounds of insect and bird calls.

In popular music "Ants Marching" is a song by the Dave Matthews Band. The song features the theme of the monotony of everyday life being like ants marching endlessly to and fro. Both the theme and the music of the song are beloved by fans, being played over 1,000 times live in concert. Dave Matthews himself once declared, "This song is our anthem." The Irish folk singer Sinéad Lohan included the song "Bee in the Bottle" on her 1995 album Who Do You Think I Am. Tucker Martine's 2005 album Broken Hearted Dragonflies: Insect Electronica from Southeast Asia arranges field recordings of insects as electronic music.

Singing insects

The jazz musician and philosophy professor David Rothenberg plays duets with singing insects including cicadas, crickets, and beetles. The band Threehoppers used treehoppers and planthoppers recordings by the bioacoustics scholar Rex Cocroft to create an album.

See also Birdsong in music Zoomusicology

References

Further reading Coelho, Joseph (2000). "Insects in Rock & Roll Music". American Entomologist. 46 (3): 186–200. doi:10.1093/ae/46.3.186.

Illustrations

Insects in music: "Kissing-Bug" ragtime by Charles L. Johnson, 1909 — "Kissing-Bug" ragtime by Charles L. Johnson, 1909

Insects in music: Two leitmotifs occur in the piece, a simple basic theme and the rapid buzzing motif of the bumblebee's flight. Play basic themeⓘ and Play buzzing motifⓘ — Two leitmotifs occur in the piece, a simple basic theme and the rapid buzzing motif of the bumblebee's flight. Play basic themeⓘ and Play buzzing motifⓘ

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Insects in music

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Insects in music claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In chemistry, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Insects in music before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Insects in music ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Insects in music

In research: Insects in music appears in chemistry research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Insects in music in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Insects in music is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Elements of music, Entomology, Insects in culture, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Insects in music outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

Affiliate

Preply — study more efficiently by working with a personal tutor. 50% off.

How to study Insects in music in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Insects in music means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Insects in music out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Insects in music in simple terms?

Why does Insects in music matter?

Because it connects several chemistry ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Insects in music?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Insects in music.