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The Sound of Crickets

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    The Sound of Crickets

    A notorious drive-by shooter (poster) recently tried to explain why the sound of crickets is pervasive at the BRS. That got me to thinking and I found these delightful offerings for you all. Have a listen and you'll never denigrate the sounds of crickets again!

    1) Josquin de Prez' 15th-century song in praise of the cricket, El grillo, turns from praise of the insect into a love song: the cricket is praised for being a good singer who sings for a long time, all the time, however, if the month of May is warm, he sings out of love.




    2) Gerald Levinson’s 2009 work, Crickets, takes it inspiration from what the composer hears as ‘the overlapping Morse-code-like rhythms of late-summer crickets. This piano quintet uses the percussion of the piano and the string harmonics to create a seemingly dangerous insect world.




    3) Mieczyslaw Weinburg (1919-1996) was born in Poland and then took shelter in the Soviet Union after the German invasion of Poland in 1939. He studied in Minsk before he moved to Moscow with the help of Shostakovitch. His ballet The Golden Key, Op. 55, was composed in 1954-55 and in 1964, Weinberg created four suites from the ballet for concert use. The brief Dance of the Cricket moves phrases between the woodwinds, the strings, and then the brass.




    4) Elena Ruehr’s 1996 work Cricket, Spider, Bee takes from poems by Emily Dickinson. The Crickets sang (Dickinson’s original title for the poem) is set in a village at the end of the day. Workers return home, twilight arrives and becomes night, but it’s the crickets that signal the end of the day. In Ruehr’s setting, the harmony builds and moves between dissonance and consonance.



    #2
    I love the Josquin de Prez piece! I've sang some of his works over the past few years, and listened to a lot more, and he's quickly become one of my favorite Renaissance composers.

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      #3
      What a delightful subject, The song of the crickets. I Love it.

      I remember when I lived in Canada on hot summer nights with the window open listening to the lovely sound of crickets lulling me to sleep.. i loved that sound.


      Here is also a lovely piece , called Cricket Dance, by Peter Terry.

      https://youtu.be/hKyDpoCKimk
      Last edited by Megan; 05-29-2024, 07:01 AM.
      ‘Roses do not bloom hurriedly; for beauty, like any masterpiece, takes time to blossom.’

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