Canadian composer Harry Freedman’s contribution to choral repertoire was as substantial as it was extraordinary. His choral compositions exhibit a remarkable diversity of stylistic influences that range from rock, jazz and scat singing, to serial techniques, yet he spoke always with his own voice. This recording collects some of Freedman’s best-loved choral works spanning the years 1964-2002.

INTRODUCTION

Harry Freedman’s contribution to choral repertoire was as substantial as it was extraordinary. As oboist and through Soundstreams Canada, I had the opportunity and the privilege to commission, premiere and perform a number of his works over the last thirty years of his life, and his choral music in particular defied categorization. It was obvious he was a highly accomplished craftsman with a superb understanding of what the voice was capable of, searching always to extend those limits. But he was not content with the prevailing aesthetic in western art music whereby composers sought to convey the “meaning” of the chosen text through their works.

He was ultimately a consummate sound poet. The clue is found in his own words about Voices: Harry says simply, “There is just music, just voices”, but how apt a description for all his choral music. While the earlier settings on this disc (Tokaido, Songs from Shakespeare, 1838) do use conventional or existing texts, even they reveal his primary interest in the sound of the words, rather than their literary context. Writing his own texts became ever more attractive - Keewaydin, Pastorale, Borealis, Voices, Valleys, all use abstract languages that Harry created out of alternating consonants and vowels - giving him the freedom to concentrate on the sound of the words.

For all his use of abstract languages, he was quintessentially a Canadian creator, turning often to the north and aboriginal sources for inspiration. His choral works exhibit a remarkable diversity of stylistic influences that range from rock, jazz and “scat” singing, to serial techniques, yet he spoke always with his own voice. Harry understood innately the choral genre’s ability to convey great emotional meaning and depth. His obvious delight and joy in the sheer power of that sound is infectious and resonates for performers and listeners alike.

- Lawrence Cherney

THE COMPOSER

Harry Freedman 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 Winzweig 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 five years he spent with Weinzweig were the extent of his formal studies in composition.

Freedman was one of Canada's most frequently performed composers. His output consists of some 175 compositions, including 3 symphonies, 9 ballets, 2 hour-long stage works, as well as various works for orchestra, choir, chamber groups, and much incidental music for stage, TV and film.

He was 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 2nd 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. And in 1984, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada.

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

The composer and 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."

Harry Freedman passed away in September 2005, shortly after the recording sessions for this compact disc took place.

Other Centrediscs compact discs featuring the music of Harry Freedman are Alternate Currents (CMCCD 4592), Elmer Iseler Conducts Canadian Music (CMCCD 6599), Quintette (CMCCD 5595), Spirit Song (CMCCD 6700), and Canadian Composers Portraits: Harry Freedman (CMCCD 8402).

THE COMPOSITIONS

1838 (from Blue... Green ... White ...) (1978/1983) - When the Canadian Music Centre decided that part of its mission was to save our folk song heritage, they commissioned this set of songs of the Eastern provinces, called Blue ... Green... White .... The sixth and final song of the set, is not exactly a folk song, although I hope it becomes one. 1838, a poem by Dennis Lee, tells the story of William Lyon Mackenzie’s rebellion against the Family Compact in Upper Canada in that year.

Originally for a cappella choir, I have re-written the bass line for electric guitar and bass and added a drum, giving the piece a somewhat contemporary rock beat which adds to the excitement of the song as it works towards its climax.

Songs from Shakespeare (1971/1972) - The songs in this set were written for various stage productions. Those from Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It were written for the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Ontario, in 1971 and 1972; those from Twelfth Night were written for the Toronto Arts Foundation production in 1972. In these productions, the songs were sung by solo voice with instrumental accompaniment. In the present choral settings, much of the instrumental material has been retained in the form of vocalizing, both articulated and otherwise.

The solo singer in the original productions was in each case an actor - an actor who could sing, obviously, but primarily an actor, not a trained singer. Furthermore, the accompaniment often included a very simple choral element which was also sung by members of the cast. Hence the style of the various songs: not too difficult technically and - more importantly - in a more or less familiar idiom.

The Tokaido (for SATB Choir and Wind Quintet) (1964) - The Todaido was commissioned by Elmer Iseler for his Festival Singers, the very first of several commissions I received from the “Dean of Canadian choral conductors”.

In 1832, Ichiryusai Hiroshige, the most popular woodblock print artist of all time, journeyed with some companions down the highway between Edo (Tokyo) and Kyoto (then the capital of Japan). They called it “the way facing the eastern ocean”, or “Tokaido”. Over the years some fifty-three stopping places had been established along the highway about a day’s journey apart. As he travelled, Hiroshige sketched. The work that he produced two years later, The 53 Stations of the Tokaido, consisted of a view of each of these stations plus one for the starting point and one for Kyoto, the destination.

In 1964 I was studying Japanese sumi-e painting, part of a life-long fascination with the arts of Japan. My wife, Mary Morrison, had just returned from a concert tour of Japan and had brought me an unusual edition of Hiroshige’s Tokaido - unusual in that it included a traditional Japanese poem opposite each print. It was from these poems that I chose nineteen to serve as the text for the work. These were grouped into four “movements” according to subject matter - nature, love, growing old, and the joy of sake. One poem serves as a prologue, another as an epilogue.

The music does not attempt to be Japanese either in content or spirit. Quite the contrary: it is the only strictly serial work I have ever written.

Voices (1999) - The title may strike some listeners as being somewhat redundant: one does not, after all, go to a choral concert expecting to see fifty krumhorn players on stage! No, but a great many people go to choral concerts expecting something else: words, text. This you will not get in Voices. What text there is, is a kind of abstraction of Inuktitut. As far as I know, none of the “words” I created actually exist, so there is no literary context. There is just music, just voices. Musically, the piece is a further exploration of very dense choral sonorities that I began exploring in Pastorale.

Valleys (2002) - At the time that I received the commission from Soundstreams Canada to write a work for six choirs, the concert for which it was to be written was to take place at Massey Hall, a venue I am more than slightly familiar with, having spent 24 years there as a member of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. The choirs were to be placed around and above the audience - the largest choir on stage, the others in a semi-circle in the first balcony. This would have resulted in considerable separation of the choirs, suggesting and facilitating the use of antiphonal and directional writing, both of which are used extensively in the piece. The audience’s position on the ground floor relative to the choirs above them suggested to me a picture of people in valleys looking up towards the tops of the surrounding hills on hearing the sound of Alpine horns. Hence the name.

The bulk of the text consists of much the same invented language I have used in other vocal works - an abstraction of primitive languages that consist largely of consonant and vowel, consonant and vowel, thus avoiding the diction problems that plague conventional settings of Western poetry. Towards the end of the piece, however, I have taken a number of short phrases from a book of Japanese haiku and put them together in different ways to form other phrases and sometimes entire sentences that are quite different from the original.

The commission was made possible by a grant from the Canada Council.

Keewaydin (1971) - Keewaydin was commissioned by Barbara and Bill Heintzman for the Bishop Strachan School Choir of Toronto.

The purpose of the piece is to prepare young choristers for contemporary musical experiences by stressing intervals and interval relationships rather than notes of a scale. It is, in this respect, and ear training piece, requiring, as it does, a fair degree of pitch memory as well as the ability to sing any interval - particularly major and minor seconds and thirds - regardless of what other notes are sounding.

The text is made up of Cree or Ojibway place names selected from the map of Ontario. The selection and use of these place names was made purely on the basis of sound, not meaning.

Although the piece was commissioned for the Bishop Strachan School Choir, it was the Toronto Children’s Chorus under its founder and artistic director, Jean Ashworth Bartle, who have made Keewaydin one of the best-known and most frequently performed Canadian choral works ever written. As Ms. Bartle herself has said, Keewaydin is the piece that defines the Toronto Children’s Chorus.

THE PERFORMERS

Lydia Adams - Lydia Adams, one of Canada's most distinguished conductors, was appointed Artistic Director and Conductor of the Elmer Iseler Singers in 1998. Under her direction, the Choir has received rave reviews for their Toronto Concert Series and for their extensive touring performances through the US and Canada. In past seasons, Ms. Adams and the Singers have toured Northern Ontario, the United States, Western Canada and Atlantic Canada, presenting over 90 performances and workshops. She has recorded seven CDs of Canadian music in the past seven years, a remarkable contribution to the music of our country.

As Conductor and Artistic Director of the Amadeus Choir, Ms Adams has conducted many performances of the larger choral/orchestral repertoire with the Toronto Symphony, the Hamilton Philharmonic, and the Hannaford Street Silver Band among others, as well as extensive a cappella repertoire. She has also recorded five CDs with the Choir, one of which, Songs of the Spirit, won an award from the Association of Canadian Choral Conductors for Outstanding Choral Recording for 2001-2002.

Ms Adams has received numerous awards, including the Charles Frederick Allison Award, the Mount Allison University Distinguished Alumni Award for the year 2000. In 2003, Mount Allison University conferred the degree of Doctor of Music on Ms. Adams.

Elmer Iseler Singers - The Elmer Iseler Singers is one of Canada's foremost professional chamber choirs. This 20-voice choir, based in Toronto, has gained an enviable international reputation since its debut performance in 1979. Now conducted by Lydia Adams, the group was founded by and nurtured under the direction of the late Dr. Elmer Iseler, the "Dean of Canadian Choral Conductors".

This celebrated choir has performed throughout Canada and the United States as well as internationally. With repertoire that spans 500 years of choral music, the Elmer Iseler Singers are known for their beauty of tone and wide interpretive range. The choir regularly commissions and performs new works, and is frequently involved in radio and television broadcasts and a variety of recording projects.

The Elmer Iseler Singers organization has been associated with celebrated Canadian composers such as R. Murray Schafer, Harry Somers, Louis Applebaum, Harry Freedman, Srul Irving Glick, Christos Hatzis, Ruth Watson Henderson, and many others, premiering and promoting their work through concerts, recordings and broadcasts.

Throughout the academic year, the Elmer Iseler Singers are the Professional Choir-in-Residence at the University of Toronto, Faculty of Music, working with Dr. Doreen Rao, The Elmer Iseler Chair in Conducting. The Singers are also participants in the International Bach Festival conducted by Helmuth Rilling.

Amadeus Choir - Founded 30 years ago, the Amadeus Choir, now under the direction of Conductor and Artistic Director Lydia Adams, is in its 12th season as Choir-in-Residence at the George Weston Recital Hall, Toronto Centre for the Arts. The Choir has become known for its professionalism, exceptional musicality, and diverse, high-quality programming - all a reflection of the leadership provided by Ms Adams. During her 20 years as Conductor and Artistic Director, the Choir has grown significantly in size and reputation to become one of Canada's pre-eminent choral groups. The 100 auditioned members of the Choir perform a regular series of concerts in the George Weston Recital Hall as well as at carefully selected downtown Toronto venues, presenting well-known artists in works by Canadian and international composers, including major works with instrumental ensembles or full orchestra, as well as challenging a cappella performances.

The Amadeus Chamber Singers is a smaller ensemble pulled from the full choir as needed, to fit particular requirements of space and/or repertoire.

The Toronto Children’s Chorus - Founded in 1978 by Jean Ashworth Bartle, the Toronto Children’s Chorus is not only recognized as one of the world’s leading children’s choirs, but it also has had a profound impact and influence on countless other children’s choirs that have been established throughout the world to emulate the TCC. TCC first performed Harry Freedman’s Keewaydin at the ISME Conference in Bristol, England in 1982. Since that sterling performance, TCC has performed Keewaydin and many other outstanding Canadian works all over the world.

Jean Ashworth Bartle’s contribution to the art of choral music for children has evolved over thirty years into one of international distinction. As Founder/music Director of the Toronto Children’s Chorus and lecturer, clinician, adjudicator and guest conductor of children’s choirs, her renowned leadership in the children’s choir movement was recognized in 1998 with Canada’s highest honour - the Order of Canada - and in 2002 with the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal.

Aeolian Winds - Founded in 1989, this highly acclaimed Canadian quintet has dazzled audiences for fifteen years through extensive tours of North America and the Far East.

Drawing on the players’ experience in solo and orchestral careers, the Aeolian Winds ranks as one of Canada’s leading chamber ensembles. Members include flutist Fiona Wilkinson, oboist Ian Franklin, clarinetist Peter Shackleton, bassoonist David Haward and hornist Derek Conrod. As a premiere chamber ensemble, the quintet has appeared at festivals and in concert series across Canada, from Vancouver to St. John’s. Regularly featured on CBC Radio, the Aeolian Winds are committed to ongoing commissions of new works by a wide array of Canadian and international composers.

The quintet has released two recordings on the ebs label entitled Pastels and Home Suite Home. More recently, the quintet recorded The Devil’s Dictionary for CBC Records.

Robin Engelman - Robin Engelman played in the Toronto Symphony with Harry Freedman and is a founding member of the internationally acclaimed percussion group, Nexus. Nexus commissioned Freedman’s concerto for percussion, Touchings (1989) and played the premiere performace and recording of that work with the Esprit Orchestra under the direction of Alex Pauk. Robin directs the Percussion Ensemble of the University of Toronto Faculty of Music and continues his association with Nexus.

Rob Piltch - Guitarist Rob Piltch was born in Toronto. His early music teachers included Eli Kassner, Gordon Delamont and Sam Dolin. In 1979, he joined Blood Sweat and Tears to tour and record for 2 years. Upon returning to Toronto, Rob began work as a session player, recording for Canadian artists such as Hugh Marsh, Kim Mitchell, Shirley Eikhard, Marc Jordan, Amy Sky, Guido Basso, Rob McConnell and released his own album Bells in partnership with Canadian jazz virtuoso Don Thompson. He recorded a solo self-titled album for Duke Street records and won a Juno for his work with Dave Young and Phil Dwyer in 1993.

Dave Young - Winnipeg born Dave Young bassist and composer has had an exceptional career. Equally comfortable in jazz and classical settings, his skill and artistry make him a highly sought-after bassist. He has been principal Double Bassist with the Edmonton and Winnipeg Symphonys and the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra. Dave regularly tours with clarinetist James Campbell and pianist Gene Di Novi in a program that melds classical and jazz music and stylings. Dave Young is also a dedicated jazz educator, teaching at seminars and clinics as well as on faculty at both Humber College and the University of Toronto.

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