Text: Emily Dickinson    

1. Crisis is a Hair
2. We Like March
3. This World is Not Conclusion
4. Heart! We Will Forget Him!

Commissioned by the New Music Festival of Sandusky; four movements on poems of Emily Dickinson; each movement, though stylistically related, can stand on its own.

A song cycle in six consecutive sections.

Appendage
Tex yeux
Warm eyes
Appendage
Recognition
Last Lullabye

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Also published in the book "16 Contemporary Violin Etudes" published by Theodore Presser; Three Etudes by Allan Blank, sheet music, is available from ACA.

Etude No. 1, Toccatina, consistenly energetic eight-note pulse, very careful dynamic shpaing. Etude No. 2 had a combination of bowing techniques, chords, pizzicati, harmonics, dramatic and gentle gestures requiring instantaneous changes in energy and attention.

Commissioned by Curtis Macomber

“The most striking was David Froom's Sonata for Violin Solo (2003), movements that segue between episodes of lacy elegance, lurching violence and wistful lyricism, until a furious, rhythmically unbounded, toccatalike finale.”  (Anthony Tomasinni, The New York Times)

"It’s obscenely difficult to write creative, interesting, and listenable pieces for solo instruments (I’ve tried!), but Froom has done a bang-up job here. Every violin teacher should have at least one student learn this every year."  (American Record Guide)

In writing a work for large orchestra, the main problem that presented itself was such: that for all the twentieth century techniques that deal with material (i.e. structure or pitch classes), for the most part we are stuck with the same timbres. Admittedly, composers such as Bela Bartok, Gyorgy Ligeti, and George Crumb have made much progress in the use of instruments and instrumentation. However, apart from some accepted new ways of employing instruments, a romantic size orchestra in the twentieth century still sounds, to my ears, like a romantic size orchestra.

I felt that trying to change this fact was a bit like trying to alter the universe, so instead of attempting to invent a “new” sound, I aimed to highlight the similarity of acoustic sounds between twentieth century and late romantic material (keep in mind this work was written in the last century!!)

Three movements: 1. With Spunk 2. With Heart 3. With Flair