Pests, Plagues & Politics Lecture 8 INSECTS IN MUSIC, ART & POETRY

1. Pests, Plagues & Politics Lecture 8INSECTS IN MUSIC, ART & POETRY The esthetics of “bugs”

2. Key Points • Insects in music • Insects as singers • Insects as objects of musical interest • Insects in Art • A photographic tour • Insects in Poetry

3. Insects as Musicians • Insects as Singers • What’s music? “…the art & science of combining vocal, or instrumental sounds………..” “…any rhythmic sequence of pleasing sounds, as of birds, water, etc.”

4. Insects As Singers • “A great many insect species produce sound by means of special structures, but only a few, such as crickets, grasshoppers & cicadas, are heard by most people: • Borror & DeLong • The ORTHOPTERA • others: Coleoptera, Hymenoptera, Isoptera, Homoptera & Lepidoptera

5. The most noted “singers” • The Orthopterans • grasshoppers - crickets - katydids • Stridulation is the primary mechanism • Two Song Types • “Calling” songs by males for females • “Fighting” songs by males for territorial defense

6. Singing Orthoptera • As “caged” singers • In China for more than 2,000 years • Japan with active cricket markets today • Hopper Houses of Hamburg Cricket peddlers

8. Insects as Musicians More on singing insects… … in Lecture 13: Light and Sound Shows

9. Insects as Objects of “musical interest” A little music if you please… • EL GRILLO (the cricket) • Composed by Josquin des Pres • a Renaissance composer, French borne but work in Italy most of his career.

10. The cricket is a good singer who sings for a long time the cricket sings just for fun the cricket is a good singer But unlike the birds who fly off when they’ve sung a little the cricket just stays where he is when the weather is very hot he sings only for love. El Grillo

11. The most famous singing cricket “When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are…..”

12. Insects in the minds of musicians BANDS WITH INSECT NAMES: Buddy Holly and the Crickets, The Beatles, Alien Ant Farm, Adam and the Ants, Wasp, Papa Roach, The Yellowjackets, The Hives, Moth, Iron Butterfly, Insect Funeral, Insect Jazz, Insect Opera, Insect Surfers, Startled Insects, Katydids, Happycrickets, Grasshopper and the Golden Crickets, Grasshopper Highway, Grasshopper Takeover, Chrome Locust, Hungry Locust, Locust Fudge, Distant LocustHorse Flies, Domestic Flies, Tse Tse Fly, Twenty Ton Fly, Lounge Fly, Madfly, Milky Fly, FlyscreenFlyspeck, Fly Swatter, The Maggots from Mars, Baby Flies, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Fly Ashtray, Busy Bee, Killer Bee, Dance Bee, Sick Bees, Sugar Bees, Honey and the Bees, Chico and the Hornets, Bee Stung Lips, Sting(?), Freddie and the Fleas, Atomic Flea, Beach Flea, Fleaboy, Saturn's Flea Collar, Roach Motel Style, Roachpowder, Butterfly Temple, Butterfly Train, Butterfly Messiah, Butterfly Tree, Butterfly Child, Termites, Firefly, Fire Fly, Kory and the FirefliesThe Bee

13. INSECTS & ART • As themes for artistic works • As objects of beauty of their own accord • “The appreciation of the beauty of insects & the association between them & the arts has always been much greater…in the Far East than the Western Hemisphere.”McEvan (1974)

14. Bird-wing Butterflies Southeast Asia

15. Trogonoptera brookiana Name after Sir James Brooke, the last [19th century] Raja of Borneo

16. Early Autumn • Ca. 1280 • Artist: Ch’ien Hsuan • Chinese master painter, poet & naturalist • Four orders of insects • Orthoptera: six species • Coleoptera: false blister beetle • Diptera: two families • Odonata: two families

17. Maria SibyllaMerianGraffin • 17th century entomologist & artist • German • From her “Tropical Portfolios”

19. Winter Bees Andrew Wyeth

20. Corvallis - 2005 Portland 2005

21. Stag Beetle 1505 Albrecht Durer b. 1471; d. 1528 Master German engraver. Coleoptera Lucanidae A wood borer in the larval stage

22. Balthasar van der Ast Flowers & Fruit Dutch - 1620

23. van der Ast’s “bugs” in higher resolution

24. Nice fly Balthasar van der Ast {again}

25. van der Ast “Still Life”

26. Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder – 16th century - Dutch

27. Johannes Bosschaert – Flemish – 17th century One very small fly

28. Abraham van Calraet 17th Century Dutch “Peaches & Grapes”

29. “Three Medlars with a Butterfly” Dutch - 1705 Adriaen Coorte

30. Hunting by Andries Both Dutch [1612 – 1641]

31. Bartholomeus Assteyn Dutch - 1635 “Still Life”

32. “Still Life with Stag Beetle” Georg Flegal [German] 1566-1638

33. Roses & Beetle - 1889 Vincent van Gogh Coleoptera Scarabaeidae {the Japanese beetle}

34. Vincent Van Gogh Death’s Head Moth

35. Salvador Dali Myself at the Age of Ten When I Was the Grasshopper child Daddy Longlegs of the Evening-Hope

36. 19th century European “micro-art” made from butterfly scales

37. Insects as Medium • Henry Dalton: 1829-1911. • Scientist and micrographer. • Micro-mosaics created with the scales of butterfly wings from all over the world. • Stripped off individual scales with needle and transferred to slides with microscope. • Preparations usually required a thousand individual scales.

38. Butterfly Wing Art No additional paint or colors used Wings collected from dead butterflies on the ground No live butterflies used

39. Wm. Wasden, Jr.

40. BEE

41. Insect representation by Southwest Native Americans

42. “In Hopi mythology, kachinas were beneficent spirit-beings who accompanied people from the underworld, the origin of all peoples.” Capinera (1993) Kachina Spirit -Lepidoptera-

43. Dragonfly

44. Wasp

45. Cricket

46. Butterfly

47. Bee

48. Aztec pictograph for Chapultepec A place name Chapullin = grasshopper Tepec = hill Chapultepec is: ‘the town where a grasshopper sits on a hill’ In the Nahuatl language of the Aztec empire

49. Azcapotzalco: azcatl = ant – putzalli = sand heap – co = in Figuratively = in a place with a very dense population

50. Insects & Poetry • Insect Poets?? • Not really, except for maybe people like • Charles Lutwidge Dodgson • & Don Marquis • “…then you don’t like all insects?” the Gnat went on, as quietly as if nothing had happened. • “I like them when they can talk,” Alice said. “None of them ever talk where I come from.”