Home > MMP > Iss. 8 (2025)
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Front Matter
Abstract
The late Robert S. Freeman (1935–2022) was a pianist, conductor, and musicologist, but most of all a major administrator in the field of higher education in music: the director of the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music (for twenty-four years), president of the New England Conservatory, and, finally, dean of the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas (Austin). The present book was intended by Freeman to draw together a number of arguments and suggestions—his own and those of notable American figures in American musical life—that aim at reviving the American symphony orchestra.
Freeman’s four chapters trace the history of the orchestra as an institution; sketch the career and accomplishments of one world-renowned American leader of orchestras, Leonard Slatkin; offer detailed suggestions about how music education can be improved at various levels to help ensure that music retain a central place in the nation’s cultural and social life; and propose an idea that he developed jointly with Slatkin, namely that “a new private foundation for the arts” be established to restore viability to America’s orchestral life and its artistic life more generally.
To these chapters, here numbered to show that they consist entirely of his own thoughts, Freeman added statements from two major figures in American music: an afterword by Slatkin (explaining further his and Freeman’s idea of a private foundation for the arts) and a foreword by the distinguished composer and librettist Mark Adamo.
The central and longest section of the book (titled “Interlude”) is a colloquy consisting of responses by nineteen individuals—Ayden Adler, Andrew Balio, Jeff Beal, Aubrey Bergauer, William Bolcom, Michael Drapkin, Glenn Dicterow, JoAnn Falletta, Charles Geyer, Barbara Haffner, Hilary Hahn, Pam Hentges, David Hyslop, Anne Midgette, David Myers, Joseph Robinson, Joseph Schwantner, Jenny Vogel, and John Bruce Yeh—to eight questions posed by Freeman. These individuals, all of them working in the field of classical music today in America, include composers, performers, critics, music administrators, and music educators. Some individuals of course wear several hats, which helps them comment from multiple angles. Freeman or Slatkin occasionally add a comment of their own after one or another reply.
All in all, the book provides a trenchant analysis—or even analyses in the plural—of how we got to the challenging situation today, plus many lively and imaginative suggestions of what might be done to improve that situation, for the mutual benefit of performing musicians and the music-loving public—and, by extension, of artists and art lovers, generally.
The book was edited for publication, at Freeman’s request in his last year of life, by Rio Hartwell, who explains in an editor’s note the tightening and reorganizing that he carried out in order to make this important work available to interested readers.
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