Henry Freeman - An American Dream, Realized: From the Tenements of New York City to the Eastman School of Music to the Boston Symphony Orchestra (1909-1997)

My Father, Harry Freeman (18751954)

from the Australian Rifles, to the Grenadier Guards, to John Philip Sousas Round the World Tour, to the First Trumpet Professorship at the Eastman School

H arry Freeman (born Henry Freeman, February 6, 1875 in Birmingham, England) was the first child of as many as seven of Jon Freeman and Caranapuch Freeman. The Freemans were pub owners and brass players. When the tavern went broke in 1881, they emigrated to Australia (Sydney) aboard a square-rigged bark sailing ship (the Syndham), apparently at government expense in an effort to broaden the base of the pretty-much convict (transported) labor at Botany Bay. When the ship was becalmed for weeks in the Bay of Biscay, three of the seven Freeman children died and were buried at sea.

Jon Freeman must have been a talented musician, and, in a short time after their arrival in Australia, he had most of the family playing some kind of brass instrument. Harry and Sam were outstanding on cornet, euphonium, and trombone, and won many medals in the popular band contests of the time. Probably mostly self-taught, Harry was able enough on the bugle to join the Australian Rifles at the age of 14 and rode a big horse in his regiment.

As he grew older, he switched to the Postal Service (so that he could still have a horse). He soon became famous in Sydney for regular appearances as a soloist in the Sunday night concerts at the Town Hall with the City Organist named Weigand. When Weigand left for London, he soon persuaded Harry to join him as soloist at Alexandra Palace. That was about 1902. Sometime after that, Harry switched to the Grenadier Guards Band as cornet soloist. He must have been very good, since the normal acceptance height for Band members was six feet (they had to wear those bearskin busbies!), and he was only five-feet-seven-inches tall.

About a year after that, fed up with military discipline, the constant touring of the British Isles, and the possibility of being shipped off to the Boer War, Harry Freeman bought his release and headed for America and New York City. There he found that, no matter how well he could play, the all-powerful Musicians Union kept him from gaining employment as a non-citizen in 1904. Though he found opportunities to play soloswith organat places like Wall Streets historic Trinity Church, he barely maintained himself by the expedient of hiring himself out as a music copyistat which he became very proficient.

Finally, with the Union and citizen restrictions less apparent in Utica, New York, he took a job at a local movie/vaudeville house and stayed there throughout that first winter. The bass player in that theatre, August Bornholdt, befriended him and helped to ease his transition into becoming an American citizen with his First Papers!

But life didnt become that much easier, and he was forced into joining tours with the Barnum and Bailey Circus Band to make a living, and to play summer stints at the various beaches that lined the Long Island and Jersey coasts and always had bands for their bandstands. At one of these summer engagements in 1905Willow Grove, just outside Philadelphia, while appearing as soloist with Arthur Pryors Bandhe met my mother, Bessie Schofield, just over from England and from the same area of the British Midlands. They were married in 1906 at the Little Church Around the Corner, just off Fifth Avenue on East 19th Street, in New York City.

By then Harry had become a well-regarded trumpeter in the Broadway theatre houses that maintained large symphony orchestras to accompany the silent films and the vaudeville acts. My brother, Syd, was born in 1907, and I came along two years later. But my mother couldnt seem to throw off her homesickness, and, with two small children, started to really run down-hill. When the doctor said she would die if she didnt get home to England, my father came back from a union meeting and, out-of-the-blue announced that she would get her wish to go home to Farnley (near Leeds) for a long year with the two children. He had just signed up for the 191011 World Tour with John Philip Sousas Band!

So very soon, off we shipped for England on the S.S. Caronia. Harry, meanwhile, had one rehearsal in Carnegie Hall during which the famous Band Master, Sousa, stopped the ensemble to say, I want all the trumpets and cornets to hold their instruments straight out, like Mr. Freeman. The Band then started touring up and down the US East Coast, eventually heading for Great Britain, South Africa, Tasmania, Australia, New Zealand, the Fiji Islands, and finally, all over America. The pay was $35 a week, but only half-pay when the Band was on the water, and that was some thirteen weeks. We all got back together in New York in December of 1911. If my mother had had enough money, we would, no doubt, have sailed on the White Star maiden voyage of the