Meet the Music Director
Music Director and Conductor | Kenneth Freed
Kenneth Freed is beginning his third season as the music director and conductor of the Mankato Symphony Orchestra.
After attending Juilliard Pre-College in New York City, he received a
BA in English Literature from Yale College, as well as a MM Music Performance
from the Yale School of Music. He began attending Greenwood Music Camp
in the Berkshires while a teenager and today conducts the Little Camp
Orchestra. From 1993-1998 he played second violin in the Manhattan String
Quartet, recording and touring world wide and nationally. He was a substitute
in the viola section of the New York Philharmonic before winning a viola
chair with the Minnesota Orchestra in 1998. He played second violin
with the Rosalyra String Quartet and has recorded and toured with them,
and was awarded a prestigious McKnight Artist Fellowship.
Mr. Freed took up conducting while at Yale, and attended the National
Symphony’s Conductor’s Institute run by Leonard Slatkin at
the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. He has also attended conducting
courses taught by Finnish maestro Jorma Panula. In 2006, he was appointed
by Osmo Vänskä to be an Assistant Conductor to the Minnesota
Orchestra. He previously served as music director to the Kenwood
Symphony Orchestra and conducted the Duluth and Fargo-Moorhead Symphonies.
He co-founded the Learning Through Music Consulting Group (LTMCG), a non-profit
organization in Minneapolis dedicated to bringing ‘learning through
music” residencies and professional development programs into the
schools. His concern for funding cuts to school music led him to work
with Dr. Larry Scripp of the New England Conservatory Center to develop
music programs that better integrate music into the curriculum of an inner
city school in Minneapolis, the Ramsey International Fine Arts Center
where his community orchestra, the Kenwood Symphony became the school’s
own orchestra-in-residence. Starting with in-house “Penpal”
concerts where repertoire pieces such as La Boheme, Vivaldi’s Four
Seasons, Chavez’s Xopili, and Dukas’ Sorcerer’s Apprentice
were mined carefully for lessons focused on the study of proportion, tone,
vocabulary, poetry, plot lines, composition, and critical listening. Through
the Consulting Group, Freed began building a team of teachers, musicians,
and community leaders who were committed to improving education through
music. Players and teachers, who received professional development from
the New England Conservatory Research Center team-taught children who
ended up writing letters back and forth with their orchestra “pen-pals.” In
some cases children who had been failing and disengaged began handing
in work for the first time in their school careers. Today the program
today includes Drum Circles in second grade where social emotional skills
are tied to the give and take of rhythmic performance in ensemble performance. An
opera program in the fourth grade takes the social studies subject of
the year and the children create and compose, with adult guidance, a complete
opera. Starting in the First Grade children are tested for musical skills:
pitch, rhythm, sight reading, and these music results are compared with
academic test scores to better find appropriate interventions through
the development of skills shared between music, math and reading. The
LTMCG school and professional development programs has been so successful
that the Minneapolis School District has made it a part of its Northside
Initiative for struggling inner city schools and its Arts Learning Leadership
initiatives for arts and music specialists throughout its school district.
Ken Freed conducting the Mankato Symphony:
http://flatlandfilms.com/KENFREED7.mov
http://flatlandfilms.com/KENFREED8.mov