The Music of Harry Freedman

by Dixon, Gail Susan

• ISBN13: 9780802089649
• ISBN10: 080208964X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-10-30
• Publisher: Univ of Toronto Pr

Summary

Harry Freedman has been an important and respected figure in Canadian music for over half a century, and his productivity as a composer has been both prodigious and eclectic. Born in Poland in 1922 and raised in Winnipeg, Freedman studied at the Royal Conservatory of Music and played English Horn with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. He resigned in 1970 to become the orchestra's first composer-in-residence, and has created some 175 works in a wide variety of genres including symphonies, concertos, string quartets, operas, ballets, film scores, popular songs, and jazz pieces. In The Music of Harry Freedman, Gail Dixon investigates Freedman's music with a view to illuminating its underlying principles, stylistic development, and means of coherence. Representative works from Freedman's oeuvre have been selected for detailed analysis. The chronological presentation of these works facilitates a clear understanding of Freedman's compositional style in its dramatic evolution from the tentative serial explorations of his early works to the eclectic stylistic spectrum of his later years. The analytic discussion is supplemented by a large number of musical examples, as well as compositional sketches and working notes, some in the composer's own hand. Numerous interviews with Freedman yield additional insights into his approach and perspective. Dixon does a great service to Canadian culture with this analytic study of the music of a celebrated twentieth-century figure.

Author Biography

Gail Dixon is a professor emeritus in the Faculty of Music at the University of Western Ontario.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
1 Introduction	3	(6)
2 The Early Years (to 1952)	9	(18)
3 Reaction: The Search for a Personal Language (1953 to 1961)	27	(20)
4 The Quest for Independence (1962 to 1969)	47	(33)
5 New Directions (1970 to 1976)	80	(27)
6 The Mature Stylistic Spectrum (1977 to the Present)	107	(46)
7 Conclusion	153	(12)
Notes	165	(8)
List of Works by Harry Freedman	173	(12)
Works Cited	185	(2)
Selective Bibliography	187	(2)
Index	189