Richard Freedman

Music Man
Through teaching and technology, Richard Freedman encourages "musical thinkers" among his students.

Professor of Music Richard Freedman learned to read musical notation before he could read words. “As a little kid, I could decode notes in terms of pitch and rhythm,” he says.

Growing up in Bucks County, Pa., he began to play the piano at age six and went on to play the violin in his elementary school’s orchestra. He was fortunate to attend a high school with a thriving music community, where he played piano in the jazz band and accompanied the choirs, in addition to studying solo repertoire for the piano. Freedman studied composition and piano performance at the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts, a summer program for high school students active in the arts.

Despite his passion for music, Freedman also had strong interests in math and physics, for a time considering a career in acoustics. For this reason he didn’t want to attend college at a traditional conservatory but instead preferred a larger university with a strong music program, where he would be exposed to different types of students and courses. While performing a college search with a librarian friend, he came across the University of Western Ontario, which seemed to meet his requirements. “I wrote to them on a lark,” he says, “and received a personal note from the director of music school admissions.” He traveled to Canada for an intensive interview that involved an audition, an essay, musical analysis, and a listening exam.

When he first started college, Freedman thought he might become a composer, but eventually found a special affinity with members of the music history faculty. He’s still grateful to his mentors for steering him toward his ultimate academic path. “I tell all my students that they must connect with a mentor,” he says. “The character of your education is of course partly due to the subject matter, but the person from whom you learn is in some ways no less important.”

Musicology appeals to him on many levels. On one hand, the process of historical inquiry into the original contexts of musical works makes them come alive. But at the same time the rigors of musical analysis appeal to the math-loving part of his brain. “There’s an affinity between mathematicians and musicians,” he says. “Both fields involve abstraction and abstract thought.”

Freedman received his bachelor’s degree in music, with honors in music history, from Western Ontario in 1979. He went on to the University of Pennsylvania to earn his master’s in 1983 and Ph.D. in 1987 in the history and theory of music. At Penn, he once again forged a relationship with a mentor, who influenced his abiding academic interest in music of Renaissance France. For nearly 20 years, Freedman has studied the mutual connections between musical expression and its social, spiritual, and intellectual contexts. Internationally published on these subjects, he has presented his work at academic conferences in England (at King’s College Cambridge), France (at the Chateau de Chambord), and Germany (at the University of Freiburg in Breisgau). More recently he was a visiting scholar at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. (one of the world’s premier libraries of Renaissance materials), and also participated in a seminar on the history of the book at the University of Pennsylvania.

Freedman’s publications explore, among other themes, the place of music in the lives of French Protestants, the relationship between musical styles and literary movements, and the role of the printing press in the transformation of musical tastes. The advent of music printing in the early 16th century profoundly changed the relationship among composers, performers, and audiences. Printed texts were more accurate than those produced under the scriptorium system, and were available across musical Europe in ways that manuscript copies were not. The advent of book fairs, for instance, also introduced French poetry and music to other European countries. “It made cultural dialogue possible,” says Freedman. “These cross-cultural contacts were unprecedented.” His book, The Chansons of Orlando di Lasso and Their Protestant Listeners: Music, Piety, and Print in 16th Century France (Rochester University Press, 2001), further explores these and other themes.

“Orlando di Lasso was a giant in his day, the Mozart of the 16th century,” says Freedman. “He composed in every genre of the language.” But he was also very interested in the new medium of music printing, personally supervising the publication of his works. Thanks to the influence of the French King, Charles IX, he became the first composer ever to secure an intellectual property right over his music. “He was unique among his musical contemporaries in having the right to make sure his music wouldn’t be distributed or reprinted erroneously,” says Freedman. And yet some French Protestants could not resist the impulse to appropriate Lasso’s French songs for their own devotional purposes, supplying them with new, spiritual texts in place of the bawdy ones chosen by Lasso. Freedman’s book explores the relationship between the authorized and pirated versions of these chansons in an effort to discover something about how Renaissance musicians heard and read Lasso’s works.

At Haverford, where he has worked since 1986, the core of Freedman’s teaching involves courses in the history of European art music, from medieval to modern. He also has broadened his musical horizons to include a diverse repertory of styles and genres. One class discusses jazz and its social meaning in America; Freedman juxtaposes recorded performances with primary sources like memoirs, eyewitness accounts and criticism. Students explore music and musical lives in an effort to understand how jazz came to be, and its significance in American culture. Freedman also teaches a class on South, Central, and East Asian music, and has helped bring Asian artists to campus through the Kessinger Family Fund for the Asian Performing Arts, established by former Haverford president Tom Kessinger ’63 and his wife Varyam. Past Kessinger Fund performers include the ensemble Music From China, a group of Jewish musicians from Central Asia, and the Indian vocalist Lakshmi Shankar. “Students love being immersed in different musical cultures,” says Freedman. “Exploring these traditions requires us to admit our musical biases and assumptions about other places and times.”

With the assistance of a multimedia development grant from Haverford, Freedman uses computer technology to help students listen in new ways. “I wanted the class to compare and contrast moments from the same piece, or different recorded performances of the same work.” For one of his “virtual symposia” on Chopin, Freedman burned a CD containing audio files and wrote a computer program that would play a few seconds of a CD track, then play the same few seconds of a corresponding track with the same performance. Students could work with a score and a chart on the computer to click and play any second of the piece. They listened to small moments from different performances of Chopin’s pieces by legendary pianists in an effort to hear interpretive nuances, such as tempo, articulation, or dynamics. “This helps them to become acute listeners, and better performers in their own right,” says Freedman.

Freedman encourages the development of “acute listeners” not only among Haverford students but also among the audiences of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society. Recommended by Christopher Gibbs ’80, a musicology professor at Bard College, Freedman delivers pre-concert lectures for both organizations, providing information about the composers, explaining the music audiences are about to hear, and playing samples to demonstrate how they can best experience the works. “Concert-goers are often uncertain about what to listen for,” he says, “and they’re hungry for ideas about how to hear the structure of a composition, or what makes a particular interpretation of it matter.”

Freedman’s goal, for both classical music audiences and Haverford students, is to cultivate “musical thinkers” and “thinking musicians,” giving them the tools they need in order to discover new things about the music they hear and play. For him, Haverford is a place where students across disciplines share a common passion for making and hearing fine music. “My goal is to join the conservatory’s standard of precision with the liberal arts tradition of thought and intellectual inquiry,” he says. “Here, you can take your musical devotion to the highest level and still find intellectual rigors."

Richard Freedman’s Spring 2004 Courses

Introduction to Western Music
A survey of the European musical tradition from the middle ages to modern times. Students will hear music by Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Stravinsky, Glass, among many others, developing both listening skills and an awareness of how music relates to the culture that fosters it. In addition to listening and reading, students will attend concerts and prepare written assignments.

Writing About Beethoven
An exploration of Beethoven’s life and works, considered in the context of changing aesthetic and cultural values of the last two centuries. Students will listen to Beethoven’s music, study some of his letters and conversation books, and read some of the many responses his art has engendered. In their written responses to all of this material, students will think Beethoven’s music, his artistic personality, about the ideas and assumptions that have guided the critical reception of art and life. They will learn to cultivate their skills as readers and listeners while improving their craft as writers.

Classical Music
The music of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert (among many others). Classroom assignments will lead students to explore the origins and development of vocal and instrumental music of the years around 1800, and to consider the ways in which musicologists have approached the study of this repertory.