Piers Hellawell

All About Snoob

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. 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. Piers Hellawell 2020