David Froom: MTNA/Shepherd Distinguished Composer 2006.(Forum Focus: Composer Commissioning)

The 2006 MTNA/Shepherd Distinguished Composer 2006 David Froom composed "Lightscapes" to fulfill his commission from the Maryland State Music Teachers Association. "Lightscapes" is a work for flute and piano in three movements; each of the movement titles refers to light. The first movement, "Radiant," moves gently and evenly, with ideas flowing smoothly between the piano and flute. The second movement, "Coruscating," drives forward with strong rhythmic momentum, using a small number of ideas that recur in various guises at unpredictable times as a way of evoking brilliant light glinting in different directions off a single entity (like a crystal or a river). The last movement, "Lambent," is a kind of accompanied flute recitative, and uses spare and simple textures to create the impression of softly glowing light. This piece was written in the fall of 2006 for the flutist Lucille Goeres (whose first name suggested the idea of music about light). Goeres and pianist Eliza Garth gave the premiere performance at St. Mary's College of Maryland in November of 2006, as well as its performance at the CFMTA/-MTNA/-RCM Conference in Toronto, Ontario, in March 2007.

Froom is no newcomer to receiving recognition for his achievement in composition. He studied with some of the most notable names in composition of the latter quarter of the twentieth 20th century, including Chou Wen-chung, protege of Edgard Varese and integrator of musical traditions of the East and the West; Pulitzer Prize winner Mario Davidovsky; Alexander Goehr, student of Messiaen, as well as the son of the conductor and Schoenberg pupil Walter Goehr; and composer, conductor, and percussionist William Kraft. He holds degrees from the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Southern California, and Columbia University. While Froom freely acknowledges the extraordinary advantages of such an education, he hates the idea that a composing career might involve competition among composers. Instead, he chooses to focus his energy on being part of the collective desire composers have to create and, through teaching, helping to proliferate good music.

Froom has received honors and awards in abundance during his career as a composer. Among the many organizations that have bestowed honors upon him are American Academy of Arts and Letters (Academy Award, Ives Scholarship), the Guggenheim, Fromm, Koussevitzky, and Barlow Foundations, the Kennedy Center (first prize in the Friedheim Awards), the National Endowment for the Arts, and the state of Maryland (four Individual Artist Awards). He had a Fulbright grant for study at Cambridge University, and fellowships to the Tanglewood Music Festival, the Wellesley Composers Conference, and the MacDowell Colony.

Evidence of the desire to share his love of music lies in the many years Froom has dedicated to teaching. He has taught at the University of Utah, the Peabody Conservatory, and, since 1989, St. Mary's College of Maryland, where he is professor and chair of the music department. Froom considers his first challenge in teaching composition to be that of helping students toward a basic technique within a basic context. He hopes to guide them toward being able to put down on paper what they hear in their heads, and to help them know how to spin these initial fragments into fully fledged expressions. This, of course, must be done within the basic context of knowing enough 20th/21st-Century Music music to know what some of the possibilities are. From there, the focus shifts to helping them explore their own musical personalities. The greatest challenge, he says, is that in a world without clear and universally accepted compositional leaders, students, at a very early age, are expected to find their own unique way, in essence, to lead themselves. Froom believes that he can help by being nonjudgmental about stylistic choices, but within any style he must show students how composing is a matter of embracing or rejecting possibilities. He tries to let students draw him into their worlds, ...