Martin Wesley-Smith: Snark-Hunting (1984)

Abstract

"Snark-Hunting was composed as a study for the musical comedy Boojum!, which I wrote in the following year. Boojum! is about the life and work of Lewis Carroll, and is based on his epic poem The Hunting of the Snark. (English composer Mike Batt has also based a piece on this poem, and several other composers have set it to music.) An intrepid band of adventurers, led by the Bellman, sets off in search of a Snark, a strange creature about which they know only a few odd facts (it .has a hollow .but crisp taste, for example, and is fond of bathing machines). They have been warned that if their Snark turns out to be a Boojum then they will softly and suddenly vanish away. Undeterred by this possibly terrible fate the Baker, who some believe is Carroll's representation of himself, surges to the front, finds the Snark, then promptly vanishes ('For the Snark was a Boojum, you see'). Snark-Hunting 1s a programmatic piece loosely based on Carroll's poem. It attempts, like several of my other Carroll pieces, to paint a musical picture of his drawing room at Oxford, where he often used to entertain his young girl friends by tinkering with music boxes so that they played their tunes backwards and upsidedown. The piano is the Baker, the flute the Beaver {Alice?), and percussion the Bellman; the tape is the rest of the crew. One of the tunes used upside-down and backwards during the piece 1s heard rightways-up and forwards at the end: Rock-a-Bye Baby; other snippets come from Humpty-Dumpty, Pat-a-Cake, Oranges and Lemons and others. The tape part for Snark-Hunting was realised in the Electronic Music Studio of the NSW State Conservatorium of Music using, amongst other things, a Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument. The piece was commissioned (and first performed) by Flederman with financial assistance from the Music Board of the Australia Council." -- Martin Wesley-Smith