poet/author featured

1. The Swing
2. Where Go the Boats
3. From a Railway Carriage
4. My Bed is a Boat
5. My Shadow (Flute)
6. Requiem

• Commissioned by the Haydn Trio Eisenstadt   
• "The piece is a delight -- intellectually engaging, explosive with imagination and with a satisfying visceral power."  (Stephen Brookes, The Washington Post, 2006)
• "David Froom's Piano Trio No. 2 "Grenzen" -- a piece so full of life it almost bursts out of its skin -- received a spectacularly energetic and focused performance from Elisabeth Adkins on violin, Rachel Young on cello, and Lisa Emenheiser at the piano." (Stephen Brookes, The Washington Post, 2010)
   
  

FroomGrenzenMov2Excerpt.mp3

The Wild Swans at Coole (1993)

Yeats has spent nineteen summers at Coole Park, home of his great friend and co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, Lady Augusta Gregory. He is now fifty-one years old.

He writes, “All’s changed”… His tread is heavy. He is no longer in love with Maude Gonne and feels incapable of passion. He feels like an old man. But the hearts of the swans “have not grown old”. They passionately inhabit two worlds, the sky and the water. Theirs is a changeless pattern that goes on forever, always remaining at fifty- nine swans, even though individual swans may die. They symbolize immortality. Yeats ends the poem with a question. Where will they go? Who will be delighted some day by their presence? Where will Yeats be?

One year later, Yeats married Georgie Hyde-Leeds. He felt his life was finally “in order” and went on to write some of his finest poems and win the Nobel Prize.

The Shadow-like Generations (1992)

This poem by Yeats is a paraphrase of commentary made by the chorus of Elders in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex.

A mammoth multi-media -musical theater work in 6 sections (Prologue, The Sounds, The Land, The People, The Idea, Epilogue) for orchestra, 2 bands, chorus, dancers, electronic tracks, narrators, visuals (film and slides). Any new production of this work would require new visuals representing the current state of the technology. The narrative is entirely from the poetry of Walt Whitman, which is recorded by the narrators on the electronic (CD) tracks. The work is a celebration of America's Bicenntenial in 1976; the majority of the sounds on the electronic tracks are short excerpts from American music of the previous two centuries, the remaining sounds were created in an electronic music studio. The CD for all the sound tracks is intact and available. The chorus does not sing text, but rather specific vowel-consonant combinations to melodies from other american music.most of the live music is not difficult, but the mounting of the production would be a formidable challenge.

Settings of 'En Svane' and 'Borte!' by Henrik Ibsen (in Norwegian)

Three settings of poems by William Wordsworth ('Mutability'; 'To a Skylark'; 'When slow from pensive twilight's pensive gleams'), scored for soprano and computer-synthesized sounds. The computer part is contained on a CD that is included with the score.