Insects in music

Insects have appeared in music from Rimsky-Korsakov's The Flight of the Bumblebee to popular songs like "The Blue-tailed Fly". Insect groups mentioned include bees, ants, flies and the various singing insects such as cicadas, crickets, and beetles.

Insects including bees, cicadas, crickets and grasshoppers produce sounds, whether by flying or by stridulation, attracting human interest. Insects accordingly appear in a variety of forms of music. Among Western composers, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov imitates the quick buzzing vibrato of the bumblebee in his famous The 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 "Glow-Worm", "Poor Butterfly", "La Cucaracha", "The Boll Weevil", and "The Blue-Tailed Fly". Operas like Puccini's Madam Butterfly and Rousel's Le Festin de L’Araignée similarly reference arthropods. Pop groups named after insects include Buddy Holly and the Crickets, The Beatles, Adam and the Ants and many others.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov wrote "Flight of the Bumblebee" as an orchestral for his opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan, composed in 1899–1900. The piece closes Act III, 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.

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