Louis Gruenberg (1884-1964) came to the United States with his parents in the late 19th century, and in the early 1920s he studied with Ferruccio Busoni in Berlin, who also encouraged him to compose. In the late 1930s, Gruenberg moved to Hollywood, where he became a successful film score composer. The song collection Animals and Insects was written in the early 1920s, but its tonal language was too advanced for the American taste in music at the time, so it has been republished. Gruenberg adopted the humorous, folk-singing tone of poems by Vachel Lindsay, at times giving them popular, cabaret-style rhythms and also creating a more abstract sound. For advanced singers.