Don Freund
American composer
Don Freund (born 1947, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is an American composer, pianist, and Professor of Composition at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. His over 100 performed works, include solo, chamber, and orchestral music, live performance with electronic instruments, large theatre works.
He has received several awards for his work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Education
Don Freund earned his bachelor's at Duquesne University in 1969. Both his master's degree and doctorate were earned at the Eastman School of Music in 1970 and 1972, respectively.
Professorship
Don Freund began his professorship in 1972 as chair of Memphis State University's composition department. In 1992, Freund moved to working at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where he remains.
The Spectrum of Fifths
Freund developed the theory of the spectrum of fifths as a way to explain why different musical modes have different emotional connotations. The spectrum comes from the circle of fifths, commonly used as a tool to teach a multitude of subjects to young music students, from harmony to scales.
Any particular note, if heard with another directly to its right on the spectrum, can be considered a parent note.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Don Freund” as american composer. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as american composer. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5292639. VIAF identifies the subject as 55570627. The Library of Congress control number is n85031813. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1947, 1969, 1970 and 1972.
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This entry incorporates text from “Don Freund” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.