Richard Freed


Richard Donald Freed is an American music critic, program annotator and administrator.

Biography

Freed was born in Chicago on December 27, 1928. He grew up reading about music and records at Tulsa, Oklahoma, with the 1941 Victor catalog as bedside book. He studied at the University of Chicago where he received his bachelor of philosophy degree in 1947.
After working as a contributing editor at the Saturday Review and assistant director to Irving Kolodin and as a staff critic for The New York Times and The Audio Beat, he was assistant to the director of the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music and director of public relations for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. He was executive director of the Music Critics Association of North America from 1974 to 1990 and served as a contributing editor of Stereo Review, as record critic for The Washington Star and The Washington Post, radio host for the concerts of the St. Louis and Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, and program annotator for those orchestras as well as the Houston Symphony, National Symphony Orchestra and Philadelphia Orchestra. He has received two ASCAP Deems Taylor Awards for his concert and record annotations, and a Grammy Award for the latter and as consultant to the music director of the National Symphony Orchestra.
As author of several articles and reviews for newspapers and journals, he has also written and interpreted many historical recordings for the Smithsonian Institution. Freed has received the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers Award, the ASCAP Foundation Richard Rodgers Award, Deems Taylor Award for his concert and record notes. He was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Album Notes in 1986 and won in 1995.
As the former executive director and unofficial historian of MCANA he has recently donated several important historical items to the organization.
In addition to numerous documents that are invaluable in providing the early history of the MCANA, a series of reel-to-reel tapes of a public symposium presented by the MCA at the Kennedy Center in March 1987 are included.
The symposium "Music Criticism in America's Press" was presented with support from the National Endowment for the Arts; the Gannett Foundation; the Hechinger Foundation; Mr. and Mrs. Gordon P. Getty Foundation; and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Works