Making Music Together: From Tanglewood to Boston to Philadelphia and Beyond

By James Freeman

This book is the result of our love for music, for our families, our musical colleagues, and even our dogs. The story is by no means chronological, though after a "Prelude," it does follow very loosely accounts of our youth, our education, our musical experiences, and adventures. Those experiences have included playing with the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Boston Pops, Peter Nero's Philly Pops, our concerts in Moscow (in the midst of a revolution), St. Petersburg, Carnegie Hall, the Salzburg Festival, Havana, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Japan, Taiwan, Slovenia, Denmark, Norway, Italy, England, Germany, Peru, and the Library of Congress. It is also a history of Orchestra 2001, the Swarthmore College- and Philadelphia-based contemporary music ensemble I founded and directed from 1988 to 2015. It includes in the appendices a complete list of O2001's concerts, repertoire, and recordings, as well as highlights and critical commentary about many of those performances and CDs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662440458

James Freeman

James Freeman is assistant editor of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and author of the “Best of the Web” column. He is coauthor of Borrowed Time: Two Centuries of Booms, Busts, and Bailouts at Citi, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and Financial Times Business Book of the Month. He is a Fox News contributor and former investor advocate at the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Book preview

Dottie’s Own Recollection of Six Months in the Lima, Peru, National Symphony Orchestra

Avery young Peruvian man was the other oboist and a delightful gentleman from England on English horn.

The conductor was a young German gentleman who spoke Spanish with a German accent. It didn’t really matter; we were quite clueless either way. The majority of the orchestra were Peruvian. They welcomed us warmly, and we quickly felt at home.

An apartment in lovely Miraflores (a short trolley ride to the theater) was ready for us, fortunately near the home of the English hornist. It had been arranged that we were to have our main daily meal at his home. We were introduced to the wonderful Peruvian cuisine prepared by natives serving the household. It was an extraordinary daily treat and luxury. The native liquor, pisco, only enhanced it. Pisco sours became all too familiar to us.

The six months of musical experiences were of very high quality, the repertoire challenging and exciting. Igor Stravinsky was a visiting composer at one point, conducting us in his Firebird Suite. A memorable experience.

Living in Lima and traveling, sometimes alone, in Peru at twenty-one years old was unbelievable. To this day, I’m not sure how I had the nerve to do that. I think pure naivete played a part in it.

I was invited to play the Marcello Oboe Concerto with the Cusco Orchestra. It was an honor to do so. Cusco, a short flight from Lima, is the nearest city to Machu Picchu. At that point it had not yet become the tourist attraction that it is today. I took a rickety old bus up the trail to the hidden city, greeted by friendly llamas and beautiful vicunas. Only a handful of other tourists were there. It was stunning and amazing.

It didn’t take long for me to notice a rather handsome young cellist whom I guessed to be Peruvian. He was sitting on the same stand with an American woman who spoke fluent Spanish, having lived for many years in Peru. Evidently, he had been questioning her a bit about me. At least, I’d like to think that was the case. She introduced us. We clicked. But his English was very limited, and my Spanish was close to being nonexistent. I studied my Spanish with enthusiasm. His English rapidly improved. I learned that his father was a major politician in the city, which didn’t mean a whole lot to me. Alfonso Montasinos-Belon was a very kind and interesting friend. It was sad to say goodbye but inevitable after six months. We wrote, he in Spanish, I in English, for a while. Who cannot have a memorable romance at that age! I learned much later that he became a medical doctor and was living in England.

On a train to see Lake Titicaca, which is famous for being able to look across to Bolivia and, if I remember correctly, a record lake for depth, I found myself sitting near an Egyptian young man. His English was quite good. In fact, he seriously asked me if I would please marry him. He wanted desperately to come to America, and for whatever reason then, that would be a ticket to get him there. That was not a romance—but an interesting encounter!

Jim at Harvard College

During my last three undergraduate years at Harvard (1958 to 1961), I was living happily with four roommates (all of them star athletes: swimmers Bruce Hunter, Bill Schellstede, and David Seaton and wrestler Peter Stanley), first in musty, ancient Claverly House, the last two years in the brand-new Quincy House. Prior to freshman year, I had filled out a form that asked what you hoped for in your future roommate. I was still pretty straight arrow then, coming from Milton Academy where if you got caught smoking you were expelled. I asked for a roommate who didn’t smoke or drink, and it turned out that, indeed, he didn’t smoke or drink. But he also didn’t talk. There couldn’t have been more than twenty-five words spoken between us during the entire year. Seaton (from Kansas) and Schellstede (from Oklahoma) living in the next room in Hollis Hall in freshman year had become good friends, and I asked if I could join them for sophomore year. (I hadn’t even met Bruce and Peter at that point.) Partly because of my uncommunicative roommate, and partly because of the lingering malaise of a broken summer-before romance, I had worked incredibly hard at my courses and got terrific grades. Because of that, my potential new roommates decided I would be a good influence on them and agreed to take me on as the fifth roommate.

Of course, from them I soon learned to smoke and drink, play chess, talk together late into the night, learn about their courses and interests, and enjoy life. And my A grades turned largely into Bs. Years later, at our twenty-fifth reunion (1986), we all met for the first time since 1961 and together realized how great the camaraderie among us had been. We gathered together again that summer at Peter’s house in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and did our best every year thereafter to renew that meeting, usually with wives (Ginnie, Callie, Sangmie, and Dottie) and often children.

In my junior year I was awarded the Milton-Harvard Prize for the most outstanding junior from Milton then at Harvard. (Nearly half our Milton class of sixty some students had gone to Harvard, so it wasn’t a completely negligible award, though I thought it should probably have gone to Bill Driver who was captain of Harvard’s soccer team.) My father, then on a BSO far eastern tour in Australia, sent Milton’s headmaster, Arthur Perry, a one-word telegram, Tipperary. Mr. Perry read it at the Milton graduation ceremony (at which I received the award) and understood immediately its meaning—from an old Irish song from World War I: "It’s a long way from Tipperary, but I’ll be there someday, and my heart’s right there!"

Bruce (who in 1960 was a member of the US swimming team at the 1960 Olympics in Rome, just missing a medal), David, and Bill (elected the captain of Harvard’s swimmers) focused in the fall of every year on the attempt to beat Yale, then America’s premiere swimming dynasty. No more smoking, less alcohol, serious and sustained training. In our senior year it looked like there was a good chance. I had even thought of taking a date down to Yale to witness the meet firsthand (but in the end, didn’t). Still, it was broadcast on the radio, very exciting. It was close, but Harvard eventually lost again. It wasn’t until the following year, after we had graduated, that Harvard finally conquered Yale.

One evening I managed to talk my four roommates into coming to a BSO open rehearsal (free tickets). We sat in Symphony Hall’s first balcony overlooking the stage while Erich Leinsdorf conducted the Sibelius 2nd Symphony. At the climax of the final movement, something happened that I had never before (or since) experienced. The timpanist, Vic Firth, broke through one of the drumheads, producing an amazing cacophonous crash. All the musicians were as stunned as we were, and everything came to a stop. Classical music concerts can really be exciting!

We did have a few classical music LPs in our dorm room: Beethoven’s Emperor Piano Concerto, some Bach Partitas (Dinu Lipati), Mozart Horn Concertos, and Dvorak’s Serenade for Strings. They were played a lot, though perhaps not as often as Wake Up Little Susie, Pete Seeger, the Weavers, and other folk artists. Peter, by practicing guitar all night and almost every night during our sophomore year, became an extraordinarily gifted and really amazing guitarist and folk singer. He sometimes performed with Joan Baez when they were both in Cambridge, and he later produced a terrific set of CDs of his guitar playing and singing. He talked Bill into picking up the banjo and me the mandolin, in the hope that we’d have a trio and play all over the country! Bill’s banjo playing prospered, but my mandolin playing never got further than one song.

One of my fond memories from our gatherings in Virginia many years later was when Peter took us to a bridge over the Rapidan River and showed us how to rappel off the bridge. Still being thought of as a musician, not an athlete, I was a little nervous about doing it. But after son Tim did it with considerable ease, I thought I’d better forget my nerves and come through. And I did. Sadly, Peter, David, and Bruce are now (2020) gone, so there remain only the two of us: Bill and Freem. A few nights ago I saw for the second or third time the film A River Runs Through It, and for some reason it made me think of my four roommates. Maybe Bill and I should go fishing together sometime (as we did one time at a little pond near Peter’s house in Virginia, and as Bill and David often did together in the summers). After mentioning this thought to son Tim a few weeks before this past Christmas, he presented me with several books about fly fishing, a dozen flies, and maps of all the best trout streams in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. We plan to attend (with Ted) one of Orvis’s fly-fishing schools this spring.

As the lone bass player for all four undergraduate years in Harvard’s Bach Society Orchestra, I remember the long trek, with bass in one arm and bass stool in the other, for once-a-week rehearsals—from Quincy House, through Harvard Yard, and on to Paine Hall. How did I do that then? Now it’s a struggle to lug the bass a few steps from the parking lot in Philadelphia to the Academy of Music. And Dorothy now carries the bass stool!

At first, I was not at all convinced that music would be a career for me and made several attempts to explore other fields, especially creative writing and anthropology. None of them inspired me as much as music, however, and eventually I realized where I belonged. My one regret years later is that I did not go out for the baseball or soccer teams in freshman year. They would have provided me with a social network other than the nerdy Harvard musicians with whom I had the most contact (other than my roommates), as well, probably, as a lot of enjoyment. But being on scholarship, I was intent then on working as hard as possible and getting good grades.

During my freshman year I had taken a German course in which I had soon developed a mild crush on the young teaching fellow, Hildegarde Drexel. In sophomore year I decided I’d ask her out to lunch. My roommates thought this was amazingly bold and cool—to ask for a date with a woman who was probably five or six years older than me. I took her to a French restaurant in Cambridge, and with me trying my best to act as mature as possible, she soon said, Jim, I think your tie is in your beans. That did it for my sense of maturity and ego. However, many years later, Hildegarde turned out to be a dear high school friend of our dear friends the Metzidakises, and we have been good friends with her and her husband ever since.

By my senior year, Dottie was sharing an apartment on Westland Avenue near Symphony Hall, and I was spending as much time as I could at Westland Avenue. I remember a few dark, cold nights making the long walk back to Cambridge, across the Mass Avenue Bridge, through Central Square, and on to Quincy House. It was lonely then; today it would be dangerous. At five o’clock one morning a few days before my college graduation, I was woken from a sound sleep by Dottie herself saying, Get up, you lazy bones. She was on her way home to Barker in western New York State and wanted to say goodbye. I was horrified because we were still in the era when girls were only permitted in your room at certain hours, and 5:00 a.m. was not one of them. I could see hovering over me the words Freeman is prevented from graduating by blatantly breaking the college’s parietal rules.

I did graduate, however, and soon after that took off for the Edinburgh Festival where as a pianist I was a participant in a master class led by the Viennese pianist Paul Badura-Skoda, and Munich, to accompany my brother Bob, who was eventually a finalist at the Munich International Oboe Competition. (Heinz Holliger won.) During my last year as a Harvard undergraduate, I had spent almost every evening at the Longy School, just across Cambridge Commons, practicing until all hours of the night, and had become a pretty good pianist. I played a number of recitals with flutist Neal Zaslaw (years earlier a colleague of Dottie’s at Otter Lake Music Camp, and years later an eminent Mozart scholar), with BSO cellist Martin Hoherman, and with flutist Ellen Friedman. She has remained a lifetime friend to both of us.

I also played a well-reviewed Bach Concerto (F minor) with the Bach Society Orchestra in Sanders Theater and a senior recital (stemming from my senior thesis on Mozart) in Paine Hall in May, playing Mozart’s B-flat Piano Trio and E flat Piano Quartet with Boston Symphony players (violinist Roger Shermont and cellist Martin Hoherman) and the Adagio and Rondo, K. 617, for glass harmonica ( I played it on piano); for viola (my mother); cello; flute; and, of course, oboe, with that oboist from Tanglewood and the house party. I remember the performances as outstanding, and my playing excellent. Having won a John Knowles Paine Traveling Fellowship from Harvard’s Music Department, I decided to spend it discovering for myself how far I could go on the piano. Badura-Skoda’s class was the first step; the next was to be a year of piano study at Vienna’s Akademie für Musik.

I had applied for a Fulbright, and Mimi Kenniston (later McIntosh) graciously helped me make a tape for it (running the tape machine) at the Gardner Museum’s excellent Steinway. I played a Bach French Suite, a Mozart Sonata, a Chopin Nocturne, and Bartok’s Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm. I got to the final round but in the end didn’t win a Fulbright. The Harvard fellowship, however, covered all my European expenses, anyway.

Family Background: Jim, Baseball, and Lake Placid Revisited

The history of Harry Freeman, my paternal grandfather, is a story in itself. His family had owned a brewery in Birmingham, England, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, but when the business failed the whole family, including at least five children, sailed for Australia. When the ship was becalmed in the Bay of Biscay and food and water ran out, three of the children died. But on reaching their destination, Harry soon became champion cornet player of all Australia. He then emigrated back to England, played for the Grenadier Guards Band, bought his way out of that band when the prospect of being sent to the Boer War unnerved him, and then to America and New York City. There he helped to organize a musician’s strike against the Union and was blackballed for a time from the New York theater scene, making a living of any kind close to impossible. He then helped to put together the new musicians’ union, Local 802. In 1910 and 1911, he was a member of John Philip Sousa’s famous band on its worldwide tour, during which Sousa reportedly said to his trumpet section, I want you all to hold out your instruments straight in front of you as Mr. Freeman does. Several years after that, having by then become one of New York City’s leading trumpeters, Harry was invited to become the first professor of trumpet at the new Eastman School of Music in Rochester. He spent the first year there by himself, trying it out, and then moved the family up. After the exciting and carefree lives my teenage father and his older brother, Syd, had experienced in New York City, Rochester seemed dreary and disappointing. It took a while for the family to adjust to their new environment.

My father, Henry Schofield Freeman (1909 to 1997), and mother, Florence Knope Freeman (1908 to 2002), had both graduated from the new Eastman School of Music in 1930, he as a bass player, she as a violinist. Dad’s father had told his three sons he would not allow any of them to study music. It was too difficult a profession. But in Dad’s senior year in high school the orchestra director asked if he would like to play bass. Dad asked his father who reportedly said, Okay. The bass isn’t really a musical instrument. The next year (1926) Dad won a scholarship to the new Eastman School as its first bass student and was also soon playing on the side in the pit orchestra for Rochester’s Regent Theater for the silent pictures—at a salary of $61 a week, big money in those days. With a good job, he then threatened to leave Eastman but fortunately didn’t as the talkies soon came in, and pit orchestras became a thing of the past. For a seventeen-year-old who previously had had no musical instruction whatsoever, to have picked up a new instrument and to have been immediately accepted to a prestigious new music school, attests to the remarkable talent he had from the very beginning. And years later, when Dad returned with the Boston Symphony on a triumphant tour to Rochester, his father greeted him as a hero.

Florence and Henry were married in 1932, celebrating their honeymoon with a trip to Bermuda (as I think about it now, an amazing expense for that just-married young couple in the midst of the Depression). My brother Bob was born in 1935, I in 1939. Until 1945 our parents managed to make a modest living in Rochester. He was a member of the Rochester Philharmonic and Civic orchestras and played various dance jobs with bands like Sax Smith’s and Art Taylor’s. They both played in the staff orchestra of Rochester’s WHAM, and she had her own weekly radio show on that station.

Toward the end of his life, my father wrote a three-hundred-page memoir, dealing with his rough but always exciting childhood in the streets of New York City; the family’s move to Rochester; his romance and wedding with our mother; and his eventual rise to principal bass of the Boston Symphony. In Chapters 34 and 35, there is a description of a memorial CD (released by Innova Records in January 2021) my brother and I put together in tribute to our parents, as well as a description of our father’s memoir. We anticipate the memoir will be published by the 1106 Design Publishers. The book, An American Dream, Realized, is an amazingly vivid account of a bass player and musician’s life: from our father’s rambunctious boyhood in the tenements and streets of New York City in the 1910s and 1920s, to his romance and honeymoon with our mother (a very beautiful violinist whom he met at the Eastman School), their struggles together to make a living in Rochester, his eventual rise to the position of principal bass of the Boston Symphony, and pervading everything, his devotion to his wife and their two sons, Bob and Jim.

In 1942, my father arranged to have a private audition in New York City with Serge Koussevitsky, the famous conductor of the Boston Symphony and himself a virtuoso bass player. As Dad often remembered, Koussevitsky said, You are a fine, strong bass player, and I must have you in mein Orchester, offering him a position in the BSO.

Unfortunately, Dad could not get out of his contract with the Rochester Philharmonic until 1945, hoping Koussevitsky would hold the job open for him and be true to his word. When that word finally came, the family moved to Boston. I was six years old at the time. We lived for many years thereafter in Needham, a suburb of Boston. There were miles of forest lands behind our modest house on Manning Street, with beaver ponds, foxes, snakes, and muskrats, which one of our neighbors regularly trapped. With school friends I explored every inch of that forest. At various places in the forest my father even posted directional signs to home in case we should one day get lost. Now there are only more and more houses, streets, and the super highway Route 128 (I-95).

I was an obstreperous kid, cried easily if things didn’t go my way, and I didn’t like to lose. My father often took Bob and me out to a local field and hit flies to us, calling out an imaginary Red Sox or Braves game as we fielded each fly. One afternoon, there must have been a competition of some sort between Bob and me (Red Sox vs. Braves), and I lost. (Even at four years younger than Bob, I always thought I was the better athlete.) With me crying bitterly, Dad drove us home, promising to paddle the hell out of me when we got there. (His paddle, clearly marked with a sweet spot in the center, was left over from his days as pledge master for his fraternity at the Eastman School.) He was really mad, and it was only my mother who prevented him from carrying through on his promise. Two days later, Bob came to me and said, Dad will not take us out to the ball field again until you take your paddling. I said okay, I’ll do it. Fortunately, Dad had mellowed by that time and was probably happy to see my apparent bravery. The paddling was a very light one, and we immediately then headed out to the ball field. A good lesson. A couple of days later, Dad happened to hit a hard line drive right at me. The ball went through the webbing of my glove, hit me on the forehead, and bounced a hundred feet away. Of course he expected tears from me, but I got up smiling and asked for another fly ball. Maybe I was finally growing up!

A year or so later, that Hoover Road ballfield became a site for the construction of new houses, and my friends and I sometimes played on top of the huge piles of dirt in front of the half-constructed houses. My mother then said to me, Don’t come home with your clothes covered in mud like that again. But I did just that, and rather than confessing, I threw the filthy jeans as far as I could to the back of a long, seldom-used closet. It wasn’t until years later that they were discovered when my parents finally sold that house.

I was always entranced with baseball and fishing. One of Bob’s best-ever birthday presents to me was a letter supposedly signed by Tommie Holmes, the Braves’ star right fielder and a special hero of mine. It said he had happened to see me out on the ball field and was tremendously impressed by my ability. Of course, I knew it was fraudulent, but what a wonderfully imaginative present! One time Bob and I put together our own Major League All-Star Team and wrote to each of the players we had selected. Only one responded—Hal Newhouser, ace pitcher of the Detroit Tigers—who said the only way he was able to beat Cleveland’s great pitcher Bob Feller was always to exhibit the best fairness and sportsmanship possible. Another good lesson.

I remember vividly the first time Dad took us to Fenway Park, seeing that magical green field, cheering for Ted Williams as he hit at least two home runs, and being forever enamored of Ted and the Red Sox (who won the game against the Washington Senators, I think, twelve to three). A little later Dad took us to a sportsman’s show in Boston, and we stood at the feet of Ted himself in a fly-casting competition with the former boxer Jack Sharkey.

Later we went to a Braves game at Braves Field. We sat in the first row of the left field stands, putting us right behind the Braves’ bullpen and allowing us clearly to see how much the curves broke when the pitchers (especially the Braves’ ace Johnny Sain) warmed up before the game. In the middle of the game, one of the opposing players, Harry Walker, hit a foul ball line drive right at us. Bob and I both immediately ducked as low as we could get, but Dad stood up and tried to catch the line drive with his bare hands (not too wise for a person who depended for his living on his hands). The ball squirted off his hands, and someone nearby gathered it up. Why didn’t you kids go after the ball? yelled Dad, a little irate at our cowardice, and mad at himself for missing the ball. I think we were pretty quiet after that.

Even in the first grade I still believed wholeheartedly in Santa Claus. One Christmas Eve, Bob woke me from our bunk beds to say, Jim, quick, get to the window. There goes Santa on his sleigh. I rushed to the window, only to hear Bob say, Oh you just missed him! I think all my school colleagues knew the truth, but I, still enamored of that beautiful myth, wouldn’t listen to them. My parents finally took me aside one evening to tell me the real story. I remember saying, You mean the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy too? Reality is sometimes hard to grasp!

There was a great bond between my father and me: the outdoors, gardening, fishing, and hiking. A very early memory. I was seven years old when members of the BSO organized a deep-sea, party-boat fishing trip out of Boston Harbor. I pleaded with Dad to take me, and he did. We fished with tarred hand lines (no rods and reels), à la Captain’s Courageous. After a while, there was a tremendous snarl involving eight or nine different lines, mine included. It took the mates fifteen minutes to figure out whose lines were which, but on the end of one was a foot-long codfish, and it was my line! I was so excited I couldn’t fish anymore, especially after the BSO’s famous principal cellist Sammy Mayes on the upper deck accidentally knocked over a bucket of clam bait onto the lower deck, right onto me. A horrendous mess. But it didn’t matter. I had caught my fish!

Later we often went deep-sea fishing with George Zazofsky, one of Dad’s BSO colleagues who owned a boat (he called it the Hockenabush) moored in Quincy Harbor and was as crazy about fishing as we were. We always came home with buckets of flounder and cod. There was a canoe-rental place at Charles River Station a few miles from home, and Dad and I often went fishing there, casting for bass and still fishing for sunfish. The logs jutting out of the water were always clustered with turtles on sunny days, and red-winged blackbirds constantly shuttled over and above the reedy shores of the bays. Nearby was a dairy farm called Walker Gordons at which a merry-go-round-like rotolactor allowed you to watch the cows as they were automatically milked. That was always a fun place to take visitors.

When I was about ten years old, Dad and I drove by ourselves to Lake Placid in the Adirondacks where he and my mother had played in a small summertime orchestra at the Lake Placid Club in 1943 and 1944. (I have many wonderful memories of those summers when I was four and five, including a family four-mile hike to the top of Mount Whiteface and back. I don’t know how we did that then, probably with my father carrying me at least part of the way. The road to the top was closed because of the war. Another memory was when Dad drove Bob and me to Plattsburgh and Ausable Chasm, and we returned to our rented cottage in Lake Placid late at night, whooping down the street wearing Indian war bonnets and beating our tom-toms. Still another memory was falling off a pier into over-my-head water in Mirror Lake, and having my father leap in to pull me out.

Five years later (1949), he and I drove back to Lake Placid in our 1937 Pontiac, just for a brief vacation. Our three-mile hike then to Mt. Marcy Dam and spending the overnight there in a lean-to was like heaven for me, and it inspired me to do as much hiking as I could ever since. Many years later (2010), Tim, Ted, and I repeated that three-mile hike, continuing on to climb Mt. Phelps (one of the Adirondacks’ four thousand footers).