Faculty Focus: John C. Whitehead ’43 Professor of Humanities Richard Freedman

If there’s a time in his life when he couldn’t read music, Richard Freedman, the John C. Whitehead ’43 professor of humanities, doesn’t remember it. 

“I tell my students that it’s both a boon and a handicap because that is not music,” the musicologist says in his office in Roberts Hall, gesturing to the sheet music sitting on his upright piano. “It’s just a representation of music.”

Freedman's musical life began at the age of 4, when he was introduced to the recorder through a program at Pennsbury Manor, a Quaker school just outside of Philadelphia. Switching to classical piano at 5, he eventually wound up in the world of musicology, where he dedicated himself to understanding the place of music in historical cultures. Today he is recognized worldwide as a leading scholar of the Renaissance with a focus on France and Italy. His 2012 book, Music in the Renaissance, published W.W. Norton and also available in Spanish, is a must-read for graduate students or scholars looking to delve deeply into the subject.

Much like visual art, the period before 1600 was transformational for music due to the growth in literacy and the emergence of printing, which facilitated the broader circulation of scores, tablatures for lutenists, and theoretical writings about the craft of composition. Freedman is a student of that cultural history, one who is fascinated by the parallels between words and music and the relationships between composers and performers. Just as sound recording changed our relationship with music 100 years ago and the digital age of streaming continues to transform it, print revolutionized the ways music was shared across communities—literate and not. 

“It doesn’t mean that musicians weren’t listening to everything around them, but that material was not preserved,” he says of the pre-print period. “We only have indirect testimony of those oral or popular traditions.”

Since arriving at Haverford in 1986, Freedman has been grateful for the endless support the College has provided for his teaching and research, which reaches an international audience in North America, Europe, and beyond. He even made his big screen debut late last year when he appeared in a new documentary on the composer Orlando di Lasso, who Freedman likens to the “Michael Jackson of the 16th century.” The College hosted a public screening of the film in Jaharis Recital Hall in mid-December. It’s also been shown recently in Brussels, Munich, and will soon be distributed on Arte TV. 

In high school Freedman was no less interested in physics and math than music. He originally planned to apply that interest to engineering school to study acoustics and electronics and, perhaps one day, become a recording engineer for classical music. However, as he reached the end of high school, the U.S. was still stuck in the Vietnam War quagmire. Unwilling to get caught up in the war effort, Freedman opted to change course.

“I already knew that sound recording was a tough world to go into, and the odds were I'd wind up building missile nose cones if I wasn't careful,” he says. “Fluid dynamics is fluid dynamics. It doesn't matter if it's a loudspeaker moving air or a missile moving through the air.”

Instead, Freedman consulted a family friend who worked as a music librarian in Trenton, New Jersey, who knew of Freedman's interest in music and helped source a copy of the College Music Society directory. Now published online, Freedman remembers it as a “big, fat book that, if you wanted to study bassoon, showed you who were the best bassoon teachers in the country.” But Freedman’s studies eventually took him beyond the country’s borders when he enrolled in the University of Western Ontario’s conservatory-style program. 

While most schools determine a student’s potential through auditions, Freedman says he was attracted to the Canadian program because potential admission came with a battery of tests. Students were required to perform, test their ear training, listen to and analyze a piece of music, and write an essay. “They were interested in the whole musician, the complete package of what you could do and how you think,” Freedman says. The focus on the whole student is a parallel he’s found at Haverford.  

It was in Ontario that he was first introduced to the systematic study of music history as a method of understanding people and cultures. The interest sparked there led him back home to Philadelphia for his graduate studies in the history and theory of music at University of Pennsylvania, where he dove headlong into European archives and libraries studying original sources and the documentary history of how they were made and used by musicians at court and church.

“Haverford was my liberal arts education,” Freedman says of his 39 years at the College. “I’ve adapted the curriculum to be the kind of thing that liberal arts students could engage with. We might do a lot less, but we do it more thoroughly. We inquire as to how knowledge is made rather than try to cover repertory or memorize facts.”

Indeed, up until two years ago, when Norton Family Assistant Professor of Music Edwin Porras arrived on campus, Freedman was the only musicologist on the faculty responsible for covering a wide range of musical traditions, both past and present. “I’ve taught music soup to nuts,” he says. “Medieval music to post-modernity. Asian musical traditions. Jazz. At times I have been learning with and from my students, but encounters with music beyond my own formation have been both fascinating and instructive for my own work. ” 

While his expertise sits squarely in the past, Freedman is equally intrigued by the possibilities of the present moment. That’s really no surprise for a music historian who can deftly draw comparisons between George Frideric Handel and the 1990s hip-hop group Public Enemy in just a few sentences. And during the past decade, he says he’s “tumbled down the digital humanities rabbit hole” and embarked on projects that turn musical scores into data for deep analysis. 

Freedman has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants from funders like the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The resources have supported his work with an international team to create code and tools to study early music in a digital environment. One of those projects, Freedman’s largest, is Citations: the Renaissance Imitation Mass (CRIM), which is centered on the 16th century’s so-called “parody mass,” a genre that involves creative reworkings of existing works to create new compositions. These pieces are something like the cover songs of Renaissance music. 

The project involves an international team of graduate students and scholars from the U.S., Canada, Australia, France, Italy, and Spain. Student research assistants from Haverford’s Digital Scholarship team have also contributed through code development and other work. New initiatives involve the use of artificial intelligence tools to advance the power of his analytic engine. Indeed this spring, Freedman is back in France for sabbatical research, thanks to funding from Le Studium, the Loire Valley Consortium for Advanced Studies.

As he reflects on nearly four decades of teaching at Haverford, Freedman has tweaked the music curriculum to accommodate students eager to be competitive in our modern world and workplaces yet who are still seeking to “make their brain a more interesting place to be.” During the years the music department was housed in Union, Freedman became accustomed to organic interdisciplinary encounters. The acoustic bleed there was unavoidable, so much so that Freedman says he always knew what pieces and composers his colleagues next door or on the floor above him were teaching. The beautiful new facility for music in Roberts Hall is far different, but Freedman says there was always something interesting about the sonic intersections that emerged from Union’s porous walls.

Those chance moments have been replaced by more intentional pursuits, including embracing data science in the classroom. That’s evidenced by his exceedingly popular “Encoding Music: Digital Approaches to Scores and Sound” class. As the history of music swells and changes, Freedman and his students will be ready to interpret it, whether music appears on yellowing parchment or the soft glow of a monitor. 

“Now, you can render music on your computer screen instead of having it printed on a page,” Freedman says. “Yes, you can perform from it. But, more importantly, you can analyze it.  Hearing, after all, is counting, and now machines can help us look behind the symbols on the page to the patterns they represent.”