Artist description Don Freund has composed over 100 performed works, ranging from solo, chamber, and orchestral music to pieces involving live performance with electronic instruments, music for dance and large theatre works; he is also active as a pianist, conductor, and le cturer. He has received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (Cello Concerto; Passion with Tropes), commissions including the Tennessee Arts Commission with Opera Memphis (Opera: The Bishop’s Ghost), and prizes including the Washington International String Quartet Composition Competition, the International Society for Contemporary Music/League of Composers International Piano Music Competition, the 1995 AGO/ECS Publishing Award in Choral Composition (God’s Grandeur), the 1997 Rodrigo Riera International Competition for Guitar Composition (Stirrings), the Hanson Prize, the McCurdy Award, the Aspen Prize, 25 ASCAP Awards, and a Macgeorge Fellowship from the University of Melbourne, Australia. His works are published by MMB Music, Boosey and H awkes, ECS, Seesaw, and Vivace Press. He is Professor of Composition at the Indiana University School of Music since 1992, and currently Chair of IU’s Composition Department. In 1998 he was composer-in-residence at the Australian National Academy of Musi c, and lectured on his music at Royal Conservatories in Brussels and the Hague, the Royal Academy of Music in London, the Prague Conservatory and the Hochschule in Vienna. Teaching composition continues to be a major component of Freund’s career; students from 28 years of teaching have won an impressive array of awards and recognitions. Don Freund was born in Pittsburgh in 1947; he studied at Duquesne University (BM ‘69), and earned his graduate degrees at the Eastman School of Music (MM’70, DMA’72). His composition teachers were Joseph Willcox Jenkins, Darius Milhaud, Charles Jones, Wayne Barlow, Warren Benson, and Samuel Adler. From 1972 to 1992 he was chairman of the Composition Department at Memphis State University. As founder and coordinator of Memphis State University’s Annual New Music Festival, he programmed close to a thousand new American works; he has been conductor or pianist in the performance of some two hundred new pieces, usually in collaboration with the composer. Recent performances of Freund’s music include Radical Light by the Kansas City Symphony, Sinfonietta by the IU Concert Orchestra, End of Summer (orchestral winds) at the Aspen Music Festival, Departing Flights (piano trio) premiered by Composers, Inc. in San Francisco, Hard Cells for 14 instruments by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony and the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble,Feux d’artifice-Tombeau (solo piano) and Departing Flights at Merkin Hall (ISCM/League series), Soft Cells (15 instruments) by New Music Ensembles at Indiana University and University of Southern California, and Sky Scrapings (alto saxophone and piano) in Prague. His hour-long ballet Madame Bovary was premiered at Indiana University in March, 1996. Recent CD releases include Madame Bovary Ballet Suite, Soft Cells, Viola Concerto, Dissolving Music (Indiana University Orchestas and New Music Ensemble, IUSOM-10 distributed by Albany), Triomusic (Verdehr Trio on Crystal), Jug Blues & Fat Pickin’ (Cincinnati CCM Wind Ensemble on Klavier), Pentecost and Hard Cell s (Indiana New Music Ensemble), Radical Light (Bowling Green Philharmonia on Albany), Rough and Tumble (Pastiche Ensemble on ACF-Innova) and Backyard Songs (Jubal Trio on CRI). As a pianist, Freund’s recital repertoire has extended back from new music t o several complete performances of Bach’s WTC Book I and his own pianistic realizations of Machaut.o

Press Reviews Freund’s compositions are almost cinematic in their direct appeal. Pentecost is a lavish, highly charged entertainment.…If one word can be used to summarize Freund’s music it would be “dramatic.” Owen Hardy, The Louisville Courier-Journal PASSION WITH TROPES generates some profound intellectual resonances and a very real dynamic energy. James Wierzbicki, Musical America Hard Cells is constructed of omnipresent sixteenth-note figures and little fragments that hit the ear with the vitality of rock music — with increased coloristic vitality. Freund has put his materials together with such quirky grace that the nerve endings propel the action to a vivid degree. Donald Rosenberg, The Cleveland Plain Dealer Don Freund’s Triomusic is an extraordinary composition, cleverly constructed, at times exciting, amusing, disturbing, beautiful, and always fascinating. George Hall, Music and Musicians, London Especially in the final poem, “Of DeWitt Williams on his way to Lincoln Cemetery,” with its keening, angry refrain “a plain black boy,”Backyard Songs attained a tragic stature. John Rockwell, The New York Times Springsongs by Don Freund is a joyous piece of music which links two seemingly unrelated periods in music history in a logical and progressive way. A s a result, the audience is left with a feeling of optimism in the future of music. Arthur LaBar, Cookeville Herald-Citizenoe

Location Bloomington, IN - USA

Copyright notice. All material on MP3.com is protected by copyright law and by international treaties. You may download this material and make reasonable number of copies of this material only for your own personal use. You may not otherwise reproduce, distribute, publicly perform, publicly display, or create derivative works of this material, unless authorized by the appropriate copyright owner(s).