2014, Week 5: Flight of the Bumble Bee by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

Here is a Russian orchestra playing the Flight of the Bumblebee.
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Here's a longer version of the Flight of the Bumble bee. It's from an outdoor concert.

Look and listen for: flutes and violins.

How does the composer make this music sound like a bee? 

Here's a very short extract from the Flight of the Bumblebee from the Muppets.  

This is one of my favourite fun versions of the Flight of the Bumblebee done in 1981 by Danny Kaye.  

Here's someone having a bit of fun with the Flight of the Bumblebee. It's a lot harder than it looks. Try it at home!

Here's the world's fastest violinist, David Garrett, playing Flight of the Bumblebee in record time.

Here's a graphic visualisation  of what it looks like to play this on the piano.


Here's another version of  graphic notation of the score.

And here's a great adaptation of the Flight of the Bumblebee  from 1948 called Bumble Boogie

Here's a worksheet you can print or just read it and find out a bit more about the composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.


Here are some real bees. 

Here's some more information about bumblebees by David Attenborough 

Vocabulary:
ascending - going up
descending - going down
chromatic scale - playing all the keys in order -including black as well as white keys

Here's some real bees from the Huia 1 garden.