Commitment: A Life in the Service of Music

By Robert Freeman

About the Book
Commitment: A Life in the Service of Music is the autobiography of one of the nation’s leading music school deans. Robert Freeman explores the educational innovations that he introduced during his 24 years as Director of the world-renowned Eastman School of Music (University of Rochester). These innovations are vital for the survival of America’s symphony orchestras. No one has had the unique experiences in the domain that Freeman has had throughout his illustrious music career. He also leaves the reader with a message of hope by outlining some intriguing curricular changes that would better meet the educational needs of America’s future musicians.

About the Author
Robert Freeman (1935-2022), descendant of a family of musicians, was concerned throughout his life about the future of classical music. In the course of leading three major institutions of higher learning in the performing arts (the Eastman School of Music, the New England Conservatory, and the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas in Austin), “Bob” became a much-loved and influential figure nationwide. His devotion to keeping music a vital part of America’s cultural life was matched only by his energy, articulateness, and restless imagination. The book tells, for the first time, how his family background helped prepare him for the tasks he undertook, and how he continuingly adapted to new challenges in the course of an adventurous and fulfilling life and career.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Company
• Release date: Jun 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9798886838282

Book preview

Foreword

Like so many individuals in this book, my life in music was—and continues to be—profoundly shaped by the dynamo that is Robert Freeman. I vividly remember our first conversation twenty years ago. Freshly minted with a Yale Ph.D. in musicology, I was set to interview at several universities back when the market for experts in Western European Renaissance music was much stronger than it is today.

My first at bat was with the University of Texas at Austin where Bob had arrived just three years before as dean of the College of Fine Arts. Every finalist was required, of course, to meet with the dean. When my turn came up, he started off by kindly acknowledging my academic bona fides.

Oberlin and Yale—great schools.— I see you were a student of Craig Wright. I know Craig well. Eastman grad. He’s a good guy. Smart too. Please tell him I said hello.— Fulbright in Spain—terrific.— And I see you play the violin well enough. Fantastic.

Except for the slight meno mosso to acknowledge my dissertation advisor’s connection to Eastman, Bob zipped through his lines to get to something that would become the focus of our conversation for the next hour. "I see you were a mariachi musician. Tell me something about that."

As I have learned over two decades of enriching conversations with Bob, he was not looking for more details about that curious part of my resumé. No. He was probing my thoughts on what being a mariachi might mean for the future of music performance, art education, health, happiness, and the Texas economy.

On being offered the job at UT Austin, I dropped everything and accepted immediately. Bob struck me as a visionary with the rare ability to connect wildly disparate dots into cogent patterns that no one else could see. He also had an even rarer talent for charismatically marshalling the troops—and the money—to bring those patterns to life in meaningful ways that changed peoples’ lives for the better. I wanted to learn from Bob Freeman. Twenty years later, I am still the ardent pupil.

Since his retirement from a long professional life as a director, dean, and president of leading arts institutions, Bob has turned his attention to writing—prolifically so. Many of the lessons I learned under his mentorship are captured for a broader public in The Crisis of Classical Music in America (2014)—my vade mecum to this day. There and everywhere, his body of writing offers a sharp and penetrating summary of important lessons for future artists, administrators, and teachers.

Where will those lessons lead? Our current and future answers to that question will be Bob’s greatest legacy. At Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music, Bob’s influence will be recognizable in our focus on building new and diverse arts communities; partnering with scientists, athletes, and artists to unlock the brain’s secrets on human performance; working with policy centers and the humanities to promote socioeconomic mobility through the arts; and building international networks to save public arts education, especially in our most vulnerable communities.

And I am just one of many who will continue to strive to transform lives for the better with music. All for the simple reason that Robert Freeman—artist, thinker, teacher, and friend—persistently challenged us to see our musical world in a different way.

Dr. Lorenzo Candelaria,

Dean, Blair School of Music

Vanderbilt University

Introduction

The ideas for the book that finally gelled into Commitment may have occurred in earlier years, but the process of writing them up gained momentum at the end of 2018. In that year, Robert Freeman, after a career that encompassed distinguished places in academia in the Northeast of the United States and finally landed him in Austin, Texas, had to face life-changing choices. With his wife Carol seriously ill, it seemed wise to sell their beautiful houses in Vermont and in the Texas Hill Country west of Austin, find a home for all their beloved canines, most of them golden retrievers (to dog lovers the most endearing species), and switch to Longhorn Village, a retirement community, also in Texas Hill Country, with multiple levels of living.

Alas, Carol moved very quickly from assisted living to hospice care and died in the summer of that year. Bob, filled as always with life energy, had plans to stay active and spent his time writing books about how to teach piano or how to organize American symphony orchestras in the years ahead, with Gilbert Kalish and Leonard Slatkin, respectively, functioning as inspiration and co-authors (even though he would turn out to be the principal writer). And there was MITA (created by the brilliant Robert Winter of University of California Los Angeles), a way to teach music in all its aspects by using the most recent technology and an enterprise about which Bob was very enthusiastic and supportive; if I remember things correctly, I saw him manning the MITA booth at the San Antonio AMS meeting in that year. It really helped him, during those life-changing months, to find his bearings and to remain connected with that great enterprise (or, for him, greatest of enterprises): music and music education.

A less public gathering occurred just a few weeks later also in San Antonio, at the Omni La Mansion del Rio, a former convent-turned-hotel and a most amenable place to stay, with a mariachi band occasionally playing in the courtyard. Samuel Adler, one of the great American composers (who was important in the life of Robert Freeman in more than one way), had thought it appropriate to gather an Eastman family (as we had done in earlier years with Carol Freeman present) at the shores of San Antonio’s River Walk. It was indeed an Eastman Summit of sorts, with all three men having retired from their respective positions at UT Austin (Bob), Juilliard (Sam), and ESM (myself), but with our spouses (Emily Freeman Brown and Peggy Dettwiler), still keeping the musical flame alive, as fulltime faculty, in their places as orchestral and choral conductors, respectively.

Fearing mobility issues, Bob thought it unwise to join the rest of us walking over to the Mexican Market nearby or participating in the touristy boat trip on the water way for which the Paseo del Rio is named. But the conversations during social gatherings at restaurants (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) inside or close to our hotel were inspiring. Sam and Bob hit it off. Both of them are incredibly gifted story tellers and, in San Antonio, competed with each other about who might present the most revealing anecdote about their Harvard days, way back in the last millennium, or about the antics of musicologists and composers who had taught them when they were young. Our spouses may have lost interest in the bantering, as they had more urgent (and less historical) issues to discuss, but the historian in me caught on to the anecdotes being exchanged between composer and music administrator as a form of oral history and recognized them as worth preserving.

I had, of course, gone through a similar thought process when I offered my assistance to Samuel Adler a few years earlier in gathering his memories, written up or captured on tape (back when tape cassettes were still a legitimate way of preserving memories), and shaping them into something more tangible. Building Bridges with Music: Stories of a Composer’s Life became the title of that collaboration (published in 2017 by Pendragon), and it was a most rewarding experience. Something similar might work out between Bob and me, I thought.

Sometime before the end of the year I sought him out in his hotel room of La Mansion to explore plans along those lines and found him most amenable to the idea of collaborating on his autobiography. And, thus, we got started to find our bearings, as Samuel Adler and I had discovered an appropriate mode of collaboration several years earlier. Initially, Bob may have thought that I would write his biography, especially since he was busy with his books on Kalish and Slatkin, and, at the time, the confusion about who was doing it may have been beneficial. It allowed Bob to make progress on Kalish and Slatkin, with time spent on writing and promoting Woof!, a most endearing tale about living with golden retrievers, as well as co-editing, with his brother Jim, the unfinished memoirs of their father, Henry S. Freeman. But there came a time when I had to tell him that I really did not feel qualified to undertake the task of writing a biography; that I had developed a mode of communicating, in English, things about the structure and style of music to be read by other musicologists (and, perhaps, also by those interested in music in general), but that a biography requiring source studies (I mentioned surviving witnesses to be interviewed, archival materials to be consulted) was outside of the scope and time frame I felt comfortable with as a writer.

Rather, it would be best (also for bringing the project to a timely conclusion) for Bob’s memory to be the primary source of the story and that his voice be its narrator. Moreover, I argued, he already had gathered the materials for, and written, his autobiography about ten years ago when he stepped down as Dean of Fine Arts at the University of Texas in Austin. Great Expectations was the title of that manuscript, which I had read and commented on at the time, and it, indeed, was largely autobiographical. It had been dismantled and had been completely rewritten to become The Crisis of Classical Music in America: Lessons from a Life in the Education of Musicians (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). Granted, the life of Robert Freeman played a role in that book, especially in its third chapter (My Own Education), but it had been restructured to serve as a guide to parents, students, faculty, and administrators of what they needed to consider pursuing, or facilitating, an education focused on Classical music in the United States. Much had been left out or given a different slant in the process of reworking Great Expectations, but the dismantled manuscript could serve as a quarry from which to build an autobiography.

Bob was game to my suggestions, and soon we had found a mode of working together facilitated by modern technology. He lobbed chunks from the Texas Hill Country to the Pennsylvania Wilds, materials for which I then had to find a place and illustrations in the emerging chapters. Most of the time, the narrative thread was obvious (especially in the chronologically organized first chapter), at other times, it had to be found through transpositions or transitions. Especially Chapter two detailing the Eastman years needed attention in that respect, as it would be the longest and weightiest of the sections: In 1972, Robert Freeman returned to Rochester, the place of his childhood, to spend nearly a quarter century as director of the Eastman School of Music, realizing his vision of educating musicians and shaping the institution as well as providing a model for others to follow. Chapters three and four would be relatively brief; they would shed light on his short and unsuccessful tenure at a well-known Boston institution as well as his amazing recovery in Texas, happily concluding a distinguished career.

Having been appointed to the Eastman faculty in 1973 and staying in touch with Bob after his move to Boston and Texas, I was an eyewitness of many events in the life of Robert Freeman and enjoyed our collaboration, as it also helped me to retrieve my own memories of years past. When Bob returned to the Northeast in the fall of 2019 (to attend the AMS national meeting in Boston during that year and stopping in Rochester on the way back to Texas), he gave me a tour of the Boston area and, a week later, of Rochester, each of the tours focusing on specific locations that had been important in his family and in his career. Visiting these places clearly evoked in him some feelings of nostalgia and leave-taking. I was surprised when he showed me areas of Rochester, where I had lived for 30 years, that I had never encountered before.

Our collaboration on the book—and by now it had received a title, Commitment: A Life in the Service of Music—gained traction during the years of the pandemic. The two of us, both born on the other side of the generation gap, mastered Zoom sessions and file sharing as well as Dropbox links. And when our technological expertise failed us, we consulted others who could help (and they have been duly mentioned in the Acknowledgements). I may be listed as editor of the book but have to confess that there were other editors who contributed significantly. Perhaps my involvement in the genesis of the book could be described as an act of midwifery, a function difficult to encapsulate on the title page of a publication. For want of a better term, we decided on edited by.

Jürgen Thym

Professor Emeritus of Musicology

Eastman School of Music

University of Rochester

Acknowledgments

My autobiography, on the surface, may be considered to overlap with Vincent Lenti’s recently published Nurturing the Love of Music: Robert Freeman and the Eastman School of Music (Rochester, NY: Meliora Press, 2021), the third volume of his history of the Eastman School of Music. I have nothing but praise for his accomplishment; it is painstakingly researched by consulting a plethora of administrative records. The memoir that follows goes beyond it in that it not only captures the whole of my life but also provides a good deal of information about my Eastman years that some would have seen as inappropriate in Vince’s book.

Commitment: A Life in the Service of Music could not have been written without the ongoing assistance of Jürgen Thym, my very close friend who as chairman built the modern Department of Musicology at Eastman in the 1980s and 90s and contributed important ideas for bringing the Eastman faculty of those days more closely together as a driving force for music’s future, a colleague who has been at my side for the past two years of the COVID-19 pandemic through weekly Zoom sessions. Our work together has been closely assisted by Ralph Locke, another distinguished member of Eastman’s emeritus musicology faculty, and by David Peter Coppen, librarian and archivist of the Sibley Music Library’s Ruth Watanabe Collection of Rare Books and Musical Manuscripts, where all of the papers from my twenty-four-year administration at Eastman have been faithfully kept for future reference by Mary Wallace Davidson, Ruth Watanabe’s successor as Sibley librarian.

Vince Lenti was consulted in some details and pitched in with his vast knowledge of all things Eastmanian and Rochesterian. Robin Lehman and Marie Rolf provided a cartoon and a photo, respectively, from their collections of memorabilia. Cherry Beauregard helped with a picture of the Eastman Brass Quintet. Wendell Brase penned down reminiscences of the financial challenges facing Eastman in the 1970s, and Douglas Dempster wrote up his recollections of how the Arts Leadership Program at Eastman originated in the 1990s. Vicki Crone and John Sanchuk helped modify some graphics. And Julia Cook provided her eagle eyes to spot infelicities in writing and editorial inconsistencies.

 I am deeply indebted to them all for helping to bring the project to the finish line.

Robert Freeman

Austin, Texas

August 2022

List of Figures and Pictures

Front Matter

George Eastman

Chapter One

1.1 Harry Freeman, c. 1910

1.2 Eastman School Faculty, c. 1925

1.3 Henry Freeman and Florence Knope in 1930

1.4 Florence Knope Freeman, c. 1941

1.5 The Freemans’ Residences in Rochester, NY

1.6 Serge Koussevitzky

1.7 Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1966

1.8 Henry Freeman on the Double Bass, c. 1955

1.9 Residence of the Freemans in Needham Heights

1.10 Longy School of Music

1.11 Milton Academy

1.12 Page from Milton Academy Yearbook of 1953

1.13 Fernand Gillet

1.14 Harvard Yard

1.15 Katharine Merk, 1955

1.16 Boston Opera House

1.17 Rudolf Serkin

1.18 Freeman Family Players in 1960

1.19 Arthur Mendel

1.20 Oliver Strunk

1.21 Princeton Music Faculty in 1963

1.22 James Freeman and his Father

1.23 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

1.24 Robert Freeman teaching at MIT

1.25 Luis Leguia

1.26 Eastman School of Music, c. 1965

Chapter Two

2.1 Robert Freeman c. 1973

2.2 Yi-Kwei Sze and Robert Freeman in Kilbourn Hall

2.3 Robert Freeman and Howard Hanson during the Inauguration Festivities

2.4 Guests during the Inauguration

2.5 Daniel Patrylak with other Members of the Eastman Brass Quintet

2.6 Wendell C. Brase

2.7 Chancellor Allen Wallis with Richard Nixon

2.8 The Hutchison House

2.9 Reception for Boulez at the Hutchison House

2.10 Carol Henry

2.11 Robert and Carol Freeman with Golden Retrievers

2.12 TWA 842

2.13 Robert Freeman in 1984

2.14 Robert L. Sproull

2.15 Eastman School of Music, c. 1980

2.16 Dennis O’Brien

2.17 Groundbreaking for the new Sibley Music Library

2.18 Corner of Main and Chestnut Street—a construction site in August 1987

2.19 Old Sibley Music Library

2.20 New Sibley Music Library

2.21 View of Gibbs Street during the day

2.22 View of Gibbs Street at night

2.23 The new Student Living Center

2.24 Eastman Theatre and Eastman School of Music with Hatch Hall

2.25 Eastman Theatre and Eastman School of Music with Hatch Hall

2.26 Map of Eastman School of Music Campus

2.27 Jan DeGaetani

2.28 David Burge

2.29 Cleveland Quartet

2.30 The Administrative Team in the late 1970s

2.31 Jon E. Engberg

2.32 Eastman Faculty and Staff, 1972-96

2.33 Portrait of Ruth Watanabe

2.34 David Higgs

2.35 Unveiling of Flora Burton’s Portrait

2.36 Nancy Hessler

2.37 Paul Burgett

2.38 Judy Walk

2.39 Phyllis Wade Logan

2.40 Cartoon by Robin Lehman of String Quartet in Elevator

2.41 David Effron with Philharmonia in Heidelberg

2.42 Wind Ensemble with Rayburn Wright and Donald Hunsberger

2.43 Robert Freeman at Christmas Sing 1976

2.44 Michael Charness

2.45 Judith LeClair

2.46 Patrick McCreless

2.47 Andrea Kalyn

2.48 Renée Fleming

2.49 David Levy

2.50 Michael Torke

2.51 Jamal Rossi

2.52 Ayden Adler

2.53 Richard Cohen

2.54 Pamela Coburn

2.55 Kevin Puts

2.56 Julianne Baird

2.57 Marie Rolf

2.58 Claron McFadden

2.59 Joseph Rackers and Marina Lomazov

2.60 Christopher Azzara

2.61 Christopher Young

2.62 Emily Freeman Brown

2.63 Tamara Levitz

2.64 Seth Brodsky

2.65 Michael Drapkin

2.66 Ian Swensen

2.67 Matthew Loden

2.68 William Eddins

2.69 Robert Demaine

2.70 Neal Hampton

2.71 Nicole Paiement and Brian Staufenbiel

2.72 Peggy Dettwiler

2.73 Judith Ricker

2.74 Ying Quartet

2.75 Michael Walsh

2.76 Elliott Gumaer

2.77 Robert Orchard

2.78 Edwin Kolodny

2.79 Roslyn Weisberg Kominsky

2.80 Elaine Wilson

2.81 Betty Freeman

2.82 Willie Stargell

2.83 CD Cover of Schwantner’s New Morning for the World

2.84 Visitors from Japan

2.85 Maxfield Parrish, Interlude

2.86 Editorial in the Times Union

2.87 Eisenhart House

2.88 Kevin Puts and Samuel Adler

Chapter Three

3.1 New England Conservatory

3.2 Jordan Hall

3.3 John Harbison

3.4 Jeanne Bamberger

3.5 Joseph Horowitz

Chapter Four

4.1 Fine Arts Library at the University of Texas in Austin

4.2 Bass Concert Hall

4.3 Larry R. Faulkner

4.4 Sheldon Elkland Olson

4.5 Douglas Dempster

4.6 Miro Quartet

4.7 Anton Nel

4.8 Lorenzo Candelaria

4.9 Blanton Museum

4.10 CD Cover of Three Tributes to Our Parents

4.11 Joel Seligman bestows an Honorary Doctorate on Robert Freeman

4.12 Four Books

Chapter Five

5.1 The Freemans’ Residence on Westminster Glen in Austin

5.2 Carol Freeman with Golden Retrievers in Vermont

5.3 Robert Freeman with his Children

Chapter One

A Multitasker in Music Finds his Purpose

I was born in Rochester, New York on 26 August 1935, the son of two recent Eastman School graduates who, after two years of marriage, had decided to start a family. Both of my parents were string players and both had grown up in Rochester in lower middle-class families. My mother’s father was a storekeeper and an avocational musician who loved to accompany himself at the piano, singing to his family, occasionally playing professional dance jobs with my mother’s older sister, Gertrude, at the piano, and with my mother as violinist.

Harry Freeman, my dad’s father, born in Birmingham, England, was the son of a tavern owner. When the tavern went bankrupt in 1875 there were, family lore had it, two possibilities: debtors’ prison in the fashion of Dickens’s Bleak House or emigration to Australia. Deciding on the latter, my great grandparents and their five children left Plymouth for Sydney on a sailing ship, the Syndham, but were becalmed in the Bay of Biscay for a month on a ship that ran out of both food and water. As a result, three of the children died and were buried at sea, but eventually my grandfather, his parents, and his sister succeeded in reaching Australia, where, by age fourteen, he had become the National Champion Cornet Soloist. Understanding that musical careers in the late 1890s were made in London, not in Australia, my grandfather eventually returned to England in order to join the Grenadier Guards Band—without, however, understanding that the post involved not only making music but also serving in the British Army.

Posted in 1898 to the Boer Wars, he decided it worth his while to buy his way out of the Grenadier Guards and to join a real musical organization. He emigrated to America, where he performed as soloist with Arthur Pryor’s Band and appeared as a solo trumpeter on the New York theater scene. In the United States he met and married my grandmother, a Yorkshire lass from Leeds, while visiting Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, in 1906. Thus began what must have been, at least at the outset, a difficult married life, with my grandmother living with her parents near Leeds while my grandfather toured the world as a member of John Phillip Sousa’s Band. Two sons were born, my father and his older brother, Sydney, named in honor of the longed-for Australian port of arrival in the middle 1870s. Clearly, this was a less than satisfactory arrangement, for in 1912 my grandmother and her two sons traveled to the United States on the White Star liner Celtic, just before the maiden voyage of the Titanic.

Fig.1.1.jpeg

Fig.1.1. Harry Freeman, c.1910

Having settled in New York City, my grandfather played in a series of theater orchestras during World War I, also helping to develop the basis for the reform of the New York local of the American Federation of Musicians, the reason why the number of the New York local, 802, is so high.¹ Blackballed from work in