Category: solo keyboard
keyb solo
- "David Froom's sonata is a charged and clangorous work, intensely dramatic yet deeply formal. . . It has a truculent romanticism and a hard passion, and made a strong first impression. It will be good to hear it again." Tim Page, The New York Times, October 1, 1985
- "It's a work that starts big, and stays big, almost without letup, throughout the excited first movement. In the quiet, thoughtful second movement, dissonances are used in the service of exquisite feeling . . . The finale seems to be running as fast as it can, with a brief pause to hark back to the mood of the second movement before taking off again to a finish in climactic octaves, as if to recall the octaves with which the work began." William Glackin, The Sacramento Bee, November 14, 1991
- ". . . a late entry in the century's long list of big, rhetorical, dissonant Statements for piano . . . Froom has an inventive mind and a complete compositional arsenal, fully deployed in this piece. Scott Wheeler, Fanfare Magazine, March/April 1992
Celebration is in four movements which
can be roughly described as
animated, intense, abstract, and jazzy. Balance
starts simply with short rocking gestures. These build up to a bass vamp
overlaid with a right hand improvisation, and finally culminate in large
chords
and racing scales. The end the piece
slows to reminders of the simple rocking of the opening. The Innocence
of the second movement is
created by two hands moving naively in
dyads to form tentative chords. A fall from
innocence plunges the music into grinding motion over an agitated low
bass line.
A progression from the opening chords attempts
to reclaim the innocence. The struggle
continues, before finally opening out into innocent dyads again. The
music in Reverie, is ethereal. Chords surround snatches of
melodic material
in the middle range which turn into closely voiced chords. The beginning
is then
repeated.
Named after cognitive psychologist Roger Shepard, a Shepard scale is an audio illusion in which a scale seems to rise endlessly, without getting higher. The constituent pitches consist of several simultaneous octaves, which fade out at the top of the scale and fade in at the bottom. Taken out of the moving context, the actual octave register of a note is ambiguous to the ear.
A toy piano displays similar ambiguity: as the length of the sounding rods at lowest keys is too short to produce a true bass note, its overtones are louder than its fundamental pitch. Taken out of context the lowest F can sound more like its C overtone, an octave and a fifth higher. This ambiguity is part of the charm of the toy piano, and Shepard’s Pi enjoys playing with that charm, with lots of scales that seem not to get higher, sonorities whose octave register is ambiguous, and moments where the meter and tempo could be heard in several different ways. Oh yes, pi. Just as pi = 3.14159265. . ., so too Shepard’s Pi has slightly more than three electronically produced sounds (all derived from the sound of the toy piano), sections, and tempi.
About the Piece
On the Edges goes by in six sections contrasting in pulse and energy. The first section is a toccata with two-handed arpeggios gradually turning into chords that get thicker and thicker before returning to the opening arpeggio motive. A dialogue follows where slow-moving chords are in counterpoint with quicker, arpeggiated figures derived from the toccata’s opening figure. Then there’s a quiet lyrical reflection – again based on the opening motive – eliding into a cadenza with arpeggiated figures that increase in range and intensity before dissolving into a trill.
The next section turns the toccata’s opening motive into the subject of a four-part invention, the first in a series of three linked by thematic rotation: the counter-subject of one invention becomes the subject for the next. This cycle completes as the subject of the first invention becomes the counter-subject of the last, and ends as the three subjects are combined, segueing into an extended return of the opening toccata.
An invocation of the Mayan deity Kukulkan.
Commissioned by pianist Mariliz Romano
