1. By Your Grace
2. Celebration - Harry Freedman

Premiere Recording, 1977

I was present at this performance

 LINER NOTES

was born in Poland in 1922 and came to Canada with his family when he was three. His early training was as a visual artist, but during his teens he developed an interest in jazz, which soon spread to classical music. At eighteen, he made the break and began studying clarinet. After four years in the RCAF during the war, he came to Toronto to study oboe with Perry Bauman and composition with John Weinzweig at the Royal Conservatory of Music. The following year, he joined the Toronto Symphony Orchestra as its English horn player, a post he held for 24 years until he resigned in 1970 to devote his full time to composing. Apart from brief periods with Aaron Copland and Olivier Messiaen (Tanglewood, 1949) and Ernst Krenek (Toronto, 1953), the 5 years he spent with Weinzweig were the extent of his formal studies in composition.

Freedman is one of Canada's most frequently performed composers. His output consists of some 175 compositions, including three symphonies, nine ballets, two hour-long stage works, as well as various works for orchestra, choir, chamber groups, and much incidental music for stage, TV and film.

He is a founding member of the Canadian League of Composers (president, 1975-78) and of the Guild of Canadian Film Composers. In 1967, he was chosen to represent Canada at the second Festival of Music of the Americas and Spain in Madrid, where his First Symphony was performed. In 1970, he won the Etrog (now called the Genie) for best music in a feature film at the Canadian Film Awards. In 1984, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Freedman remains one of a handful of composers who earn their livelihoods solely from their music. His wide experience in all musical fields has enabled him to write in many different idioms, all of which have contributed to and are recognizable in his musical style.

The composer-critic Udo Kasemets had this to say in an early review of Tableau and Images: "...He has all the makings of becoming a prominent figure on the Canadian scene, especially since he has captured in his music, much of the spiritual atmosphere of this country. If we ask, what is Canadianism in music? a great part of the answer may well lie in Freedman's work and personality... Here is a man whose ethnic origin is neither English nor French and whose birthplace was outside of this country, yet whose upbringing and education took place in Canada and whose artistic fights are fought in the atmosphere of the land of his parents' adoption."

CELEBRATION

Harry Freedman wrote Celebration in 1977 for the renowned jazz saxophonist, Gerry Mulligan.

" Harry and I had been friends for years," Mulligan recalled. "We often talked about Harry writing a piece for me with orchestra. The opportunity finally came about when the CBC commissioned Harry to write a piece featuring me. It wound up being played as part of my 50th birthday celebration.

"I like the idea of combining both a formal score and a conductor with the improvisation of jazz. I think it's becoming more apparent the way the elements can be combined, especially in the hands of composers like Harry, who know what kinds of jazz feelings can be incorporated in the orchestra."

Freedman casts the piece in a conventional fast-slow-fast structure that allows the bulk of the saxophonist's contribution to be improvised within the framework. Mulligan plays baritone on the outer movements and soprano for the bluesy middle movement. The only saxophone parts that are written out are for those sections where the soloist and the orchestra "trade fours" and so no two performances of Celebration could be the same. Composer and soloist kept tinkering with the piece, and it remained a work in progress until its last performance by Mulligan at Lincoln Center, some ten years after its premiere.