John Freeman (14)

Composer. John Freeman was born in 1928 in New York City. Becoming interested in music as a teenager, he studied piano, theory, harmony and counterpoint with private teachers. In the summer of 1948, when he turned twenty, he was a member of the composition class at Tanglewood in Lenox, Massachusetts, with Darius Milhaud as teacher. Others in the class included Robert Kurka, Hector Tosa and Lester Trimble. Two years later, shortly after graduating from Yale College with M.A. in English, he composed his String Quartet. Mr. Freeman's other compositions include several song cycles with accompaniment scored for chamber groups, as well as quartets and quintets for winds and other chamber pieces. His "Cumming Songs" were introduced by Catherine Rowe, soprano, in 1976; his "Lanier Songs" by Edith Gordon Ainsberg and his "Melville Songs" by Theodor Uppman in 1977. He has also written settings of many of James Joyce's early poems entitled "Chamber Music" and settings of poetry by the American writers Stephen Crane, Henry David Thoreau and John Rawlings