The Music of Harry Freedman by Gail Dixon

By Gail Dixon

Harry Freedman has been a massive and revered determine in Canadian song for over part a century, and his productiveness as a composer has been either prodigious and eclectic. Born in Poland in 1922 and raised in Winnipeg, Freedman studied on the Royal Conservatory of tune and performed English Horn with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. He resigned in 1970 to develop into the orchestra's first composer-in-residence, and has created a few one hundred seventy five works in a large choice of genres together with symphonies, concertos, string quartets, operas, ballets, movie ratings, renowned songs, and jazz pieces.

In The song of Harry Freedman, Gail Dixon investigates Freedman's track which will illuminating its underlying rules, stylistic improvement, and technique of coherence. consultant works from Freedman's oeuvre were chosen for unique research. The chronological presentation of those works allows a transparent figuring out of Freedman's compositional sort in its dramatic evolution from the tentative serial explorations of his early works to the eclectic stylistic spectrum of his later years. The analytic dialogue is supplemented via quite a few musical examples, in addition to compositional sketches and dealing notes, a few within the composer's personal hand. a number of interviews with Freedman yield extra insights into his process and standpoint. Dixon does an excellent provider to Canadian tradition with this analytic learn of the track of a celebrated twentieth-century figure.

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By Gail Dixon

Harry Freedman has been a massive and revered determine in Canadian song for over part a century, and his productiveness as a composer has been either prodigious and eclectic. Born in Poland in 1922 and raised in Winnipeg, Freedman studied on the Royal Conservatory of tune and performed English Horn with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. He resigned in 1970 to develop into the orchestra's first composer-in-residence, and has created a few one hundred seventy five works in a large choice of genres together with symphonies, concertos, string quartets, operas, ballets, movie ratings, renowned songs, and jazz pieces.

In The song of Harry Freedman, Gail Dixon investigates Freedman's track which will illuminating its underlying rules, stylistic improvement, and technique of coherence. consultant works from Freedman's oeuvre were chosen for unique research. The chronological presentation of those works allows a transparent figuring out of Freedman's compositional sort in its dramatic evolution from the tentative serial explorations of his early works to the eclectic stylistic spectrum of his later years. The analytic dialogue is supplemented via quite a few musical examples, in addition to compositional sketches and dealing notes, a few within the composer's personal hand. a number of interviews with Freedman yield extra insights into his process and standpoint. Dixon does an excellent provider to Canadian tradition with this analytic learn of the track of a celebrated twentieth-century figure.

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Extra resources for The Music of Harry Freedman

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The voices enter successively at three-measure intervals, repeating the four-measure theme a number of times, so that each measure of this complex texture eventually contains each of the four textual fragments, superimposed. Thus all the requisite textual information is presented to the listener, but in such a manner that it cannot be easily deciphered, a subtle underpinning of 56 The Music of Harry Freedman the meaning of those lines. The resultant confusion is heightened by the cumulative addition of the instruments immediately following the second vocal entry.

The first significant work of this period is Fantasy and Allegro, a twelve-minute piece for string orchestra completed in 1962. In this work Freedman began tentatively to experiment once again with serial elements. The Fantasy opens with a succession of alternating fortissimo chords reminiscent of the paired opening chords in the first movement of Images, though with several differences. On a superficial level, the tempo is considerably slower in the Fantasy. More significantly, whereas in Images there are five pcs in each chord, two of which are present in both chords, in Fantasy there are six pcs in each chord, none of which is present in both chords.

The composer asserts that he chose the pitch class content of the paired chords in Fantasy and Allegro for two reasons: he wished to encompass the aggregate, and he simply liked the sound that resulted from that particular allocation of tones among the chords. In one place in the Fantasy and Allegro Freedman experimented with a nine-note partially ordered set. From Rehearsal 13 to Rehearsal 18 the thematic material excludes pcs 5, 6, and 7 entirely, and in most of the thematic occurrences the opening four pitch classes (a representation of pc set class 4-16) recur in the same order.

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