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Digital download
- Piers Hellawell
All About Snoob
- Peters Edition Limited (World)
This work was written for a project during Covid Lockdown, in which COMA (Contemporary Music for All) sought to provide short solo works online, so as to overcome players’ musical isolation. It was premiered online in 2020 by Jeremy Crump (bassoon). The work is a character piece that imagines a louche character, Snoob – a creation suggested by the bassoon’s own dramatic potential. A video, performed by Florence Plane, is at (831) July 25th 9pm - Concert 5: A Musical Fantasy - YouTube at 7’45” (with intro by the composer); it is also available played by legendary New York bassoonist Frank Morelli, at https://youtu.be/9VRN7fUZsiA
Programme Note
All About Snoob for solo bassoon was written for Jeremy Crump as the first in the Lockdown Commissioning Triangles series for CoMA during the spring of 2020. Chris Shurety and I devised the idea of bringing short solo pieces for keen amateurs into being, to overcome the virus-induced national isolation of that time, which had put an end to live concert activity. The piece was premiered by Jeremy Crump on Youtube in June 2020.
All About Snoob is a character piece, whose music unfolds in three phases, all tributes to the bassoon. Snoob is a louche character – a wit, of some learning, a flâneur who is now somewhat down at heel – the type who seems to know everybody, without having any obvious profession. Everyone runs into Snoob, but no one knows much of Snoob’s history… Such characters add colour to the tapestry of other lives but seem to lack any clear framework to their own; in chance encounters they point out things we had not thought of, even things we wished we had not thought of – but then they’re gone, as if only to exist for that gad-fly purpose – stinging us into seeing things through another’s imagination. Such characters leave much of what they feel hidden away; maybe they only exist at all in our own consciousness. So this is all about Snoob.
Pers Hellawell 2020