Harry Freedman was a distinguished composer, English horn player, and educator. Below is a comprehensive look at his life and career, focusing on his contributions to music and arts. Read on at toronto-trend.
Family Background and Career Highlights
Freedman spent his early years in Medicine Hat, Alberta, where his father worked as a fur trader. In 1931, the family moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba. At the age of 13, Freedman joined the Winnipeg School of Art to pursue a diploma in painting. However, his interest soon shifted to music, particularly jazz and big-band sounds. He started learning the clarinet as an adult, under the tutelage of Arthur Hart, a principal clarinetist and director of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, who introduced Freedman to symphonic music.
After serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II, Freedman settled in Toronto. From 1945 to 1951, he studied composition under John Weinzweig at the Royal Conservatory of Music and oboe under Perry Bauman. He also attended summer courses with Olivier Messiaen and Aaron Copland at Tanglewood. Freedman later joined the Toronto Symphony Orchestra as an English horn player, a role he held for 25 years. In his final year with the orchestra, he became its first composer-in-residence, crafting significant works such as orchestral arrangements of O Canada and God Save the Queen and Graphic I (Out of Silence…), which celebrated the orchestra’s 50th anniversary.
After 1971, Freedman dedicated himself entirely to composing, while continuing to teach orchestration and composition at the University of Toronto (1989–1991). He also worked extensively with the Courtenay Youth Music Centre, composing commissioned works like Graphic II for the Purcell String Quartet and the jazz opera Abracadabra.
Artistic Influences: Weinzweig and Visual Arts
In Harry Freedman’s early work Divertimento for Oboe and Strings, the influence of his mentor John Weinzweig is evident. However, with Tableau, composed for chamber orchestra, Freedman demonstrated his unique artistic voice. This piece marked his first use of the 12-tone technique, a method rooted in Weinzweig’s approach of treating the tone row as a self-contained melodic entity and a source for extracting motivic material.
Notably, Tableau became one of Freedman’s earliest compositions inspired by visual art, specifically the Canadian Arctic. Similarly, his works Images and Klee Wyck were deeply influenced by Canadian painting. These pieces, created in 1958 for the McGill Chamber Orchestra under the Lapitsky Foundation’s commission and orchestrated the following year, reflect Freedman’s impressions of Lawren Harris’s Blue Mountain, Kazuo Nakamura’s Structure at Dusk, and Jean-Paul Riopelle’s Landscape.
These compositions exemplify Freedman’s ability to translate visual artistry into compelling musical narratives, establishing a distinctive connection between Canadian art and music.
Transition Away from the 12-Tone Technique
Later in his career, Freedman entirely abandoned the 12-tone technique while working on his Symphony No. 1. He began composing the piece in the summer of 1953 during his studies with Ernst Krenek at the Royal Conservatory of Music, completing it in 1960. During this time, Freedman came to see the strict manipulation of 12-tone patterns as limiting. This realization led him to focus on expansive melodies and expressive orchestral discourse. The premiere of Symphony No. 1 took place in 1961, performed by the CBC Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Geoffrey Waddington at the Inter-American Festival in Washington, D.C.
However, Freedman eventually revisited the 12-tone technique in 1964. Commissioned to compose a piece for the Festival Singers, he decided to create a cycle of 19 classical Japanese poems in the forms of haiku, tanka, and senryu. These poems were inspired by the 53 Stations of the Tokaido, a series of woodblock prints by Ichiryusai Hiroshige depicting the famous route from Kyoto to Tokyo.
This commission led Freedman to explore sumi-e, the Japanese art of ink painting, characterized by a high degree of expression achieved through the disciplined economy of brushstrokes. The paradox of creative freedom achieved within formalized artistic traditions—a hallmark of Eastern art—inspired Freedman to view the constraints of serial techniques as a potential advantage for structuring musical expression. Recognizing the suitability of the 12-tone method, Freedman discovered that it could effectively support the natural imagery in the poetry, much as Debussy’s expanded tonal language had served Impressionism in an earlier era.
The resulting composition, The Tokaido, became a cornerstone of Freedman’s musical language. While he never returned to strict serialism, he continued to incorporate elements of the technique into his works, enriching his compositional vocabulary and allowing him to balance structure with evocative expression.
Music for Film, Theatre, and Ballet
In the early 1960s, Freedman became deeply interested in composing music for films, television, and theatre. By the mid-1970s, he had created scores for approximately 15 films and television productions, including Pale Horse, Pale Rider, The Pyx, Lies My Father Told Me, and Act of the Heart by Paul Almond. His cantata The Flame Within, which shared an album with The Tokaido, became a central feature of Almond’s film and won the Etrog Award for Best Feature Film at the Canadian Film Awards in 1970. After 1970, as a member of Toronto’s Film Co-op group, Freedman continued exploring the interplay between music and cinema.
Freedman also composed music for numerous theatre productions, including Stratford Festival performances of Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night; Toronto Arts Productions’ Twelfth Night; and the Lennoxville Festival staging of George Ryga’s Sunlight on Sarah. Additionally, he wrote three commissioned scores for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet.
The first of these, Rose Latulippe by Brian Macdonald, premiered at the Stratford Festival in 1966. Scored for a small orchestra with harp and percussion, the piece reached its emotional and dramatic peak with a “haunting and thrilling” 12-tone violin dance that accompanied the central dramatic action. The ballet was later adapted for television by Franz Kraemer and Pierre Morin for CBC in 1967.
Freedman’s second ballet for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, Five over Thirteen, premiered in 1969 at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. His third project, The Shining People by Leonard Cohen, premiered in June 1970 in Paris and was subsequently performed in Ottawa in July. This ballet combined an electronic tape featuring excerpts from Cohen’s The Spice-Box of Earth, natural soundscapes, and soprano vocals by Freedman’s wife, Mary Morrison.
Freedman’s concert works from the 1970s also reflected the influence of his theatrical projects. For example, Pan, composed for the Lyric Arts Trio, required the performers to stomp their feet, whisper, cluck, shout into the piano strings, and act out a comedic episode—alongside their conventional roles as soprano, flutist, and pianist. This innovative approach demonstrated Freedman’s ability to integrate theatricality and music, pushing the boundaries of traditional performance.
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