Music Makers: The Lives of Harry Freedman and Mary Morrison (review)

A basic rule of reviewing is not to criticize a book for something it didn't set out to do. My frustration with this book is trying to discover quite what the author was attempting to achieve. This difficulty is summed up for me in two short sentences tucked away unobtrusively. The first is near the end of the preface, in which Walter Pitman says, 'Musicologists and scholars of music theory and composition will find no analysis of Harry's music compositions in this book.' Instead readers are directed to Gail Dixon's The Music of Harry Freedman. Why would anyone write about a composer without the intent to illuminate the music in some way?

But wait. This is a book about a husband and wife – not just about Harry Freedman, but also about the singer Mary Morrison. Recently there has been a lot of scholarly interest in collaborative artistic couples and the peculiar dynamic of their work; the work of the artist Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude is a case in point. Perhaps this is another such study? That hope is dashed by a second sentence. Commenting on the couple setting up home in Richmond Hill, north of Toronto, Pitman quotes Mary Morrison joking that 'Harry and I waved to each other on Yonge Street as he drove south to a concert performance as I drove north after a COC rehearsal.' That is just how the book progresses, with bits about Mary Morrison followed by bits about the composer, the two passing each other without anyone deriving much benefit from this dual treatment.

Pitman has an inordinate love of scare quotes. There may be the odd occasion when they are appropriate; usually they signal that the writer is venturing into fields in which he is insecure. What are we to make of his description of Morrison taking part in an orchestral performance of Schoenberg's Second String Quartet, in which her addition is described as 'surprising' – his quotation marks. In 2006, almost a hundred years after it was composed, the appearance of the soprano in this work is only surprising in the way that Haydn's 94th symphony still contains any element of surprise.

Although we are promised no analysis of Freedman's music, even Pitman cannot ignore the music entirely. What we get instead, as each work pops up in the narrative, are quotations from newspaper critics reviewing the first performances. Such documents can be very valuable for what they tell us about the reception history of compositions, but to be used in this way they need to be carefully interpreted. Here they simply stand in place of a first-hand understanding of the music, and they come from wherever they are to be found – thoughtful comments from Kenneth Winters and William Littler rubbing shoulders indiscriminately with the first-time efforts of novice critics in student newspapers. In the end it is the lack of any musical insight that makes this book so depressing. It is not just that the author doesn't understand individual compositions; he also seems curiously unaware of the ways in which music works in society.

It is significant that the scare quotes drop off markedly when we get to chapter 9 – "The Artist as Activist." Pitman seems more at home describing Freedman's cultural and political activism, and this is the most successful section of the book. But, the editor should have insisted on removing some of the painfully simplistic discussions of world events that are presented here as context.

A saving grace of some books that are unsatisfactory in other respects is that they gather a lot of information that is unavailable elsewhere, and that can then be mined by other scholars. There is useful information here, but scholars will tear their hair out trying to make use of it: although there are numerous quotations – real ones, not just scare ones – there is not a single footnote or endnote reference throughout the whole book. Now that...