Her Musical Gallery

The way Betty Freeman tells it, her photography work began purely by accident. On the set of a documentary about composer Harry Partch, which she produced in 1972, Freeman was the only person available to take stills. Somebody handed her a Nikon, set the focus and speed and told her to shoot.

“The photographs came out so well that I’ve been hooked ever since,” says Freeman, who was already passionate about art collecting and music patronage. Twenty-six years later, she has amassed thousands of photographs that eloquently chronicle the composers, conductors and other musical artists of our time.

About 50 of Freeman’s photographs have just gone on exhibit (through May 31) at the Edmund D. Edelman Hollywood Bowl Museum. Predominantly of people associated with the Bowl in one way or another, the photographs feature such familiar faces locally as Esa-Pekka Salonen and Simon Rattle, and capture a who’s who of late 20th century music, photographed in their homes, in restaurants, at concerts and elsewhere in L.A. and around the world.

For instance, there’s Freeman’s portrait of director Peter Sellars, caught at his place in Venice, relaxing alongside a visiting cat. English conductor Jeffrey Tate was photographed when Freeman and Tate were visiting artist David Hockney’s studio in the Hollywood Hills.

Pursuing new music as both listener and patron, Freeman frequently travels here and abroad, and her camera is always with her. Two pictures of conductor Kent Nagano made the cut, one from the Salzburg Festival in Austria, the other at the Ojai Festival. Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti sat for her at his home in Hamburg and Morton Subotnick at lunch in Santa Fe. French composer Pierre Boulez appears in pictures at Milan’s Ansaldo factory prior to a concert and at his Paris home.

“Betty has an incredible knack for getting the persona of the artist--John Cage or Alfred Brendel or Pierre Boulez,” says another of her subjects, Ernest Fleischmann, the just-retired managing director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Each is represented in the show. “I don’t know who else has captured the essence of those three the way Betty has.”

Bowl museum director Carol Merrill-Mirsky notes Freeman’s intimacy with her subjects, and composer John Adams goes a step further. “Composers know about Betty and know she’s a fan,” Adams says. “She likes contemporary music and even very difficult, thorny, dissonant contemporary music, and that makes her unique. If someone says Mrs. Freeman would like to take your picture, it’s an honor.”

It’s also relatively painless. Both Fleischmann and Adams refer to how unobtrusively Freeman goes about taking pictures, and that’s intentional. After devoting more than 30 years to nurturing the creation and performance of contemporary music, the elegant 77-year-old photographer is well aware that creative time is precious. “I’m in and out of the door in 30 minutes. I promise everyone that before I take a picture.”

Shooting in black and white, Freeman says she usually takes “just 10 frames of each subject--at the most, a roll of 36--and I never shoot for more than 15 minutes. They get tired--I know I do as a subject--and I discovered that either you feel people in 15 minutes or you don’t.

“The other thing I discovered,” she continues, her photos spread out around her in her Los Angeles home, “is that I never ask subjects to smile because if I do, they’re putting on a face for the camera. Instead I ask them just to sit and either think of a composition they’re writing or to think of something sad.”

Among her most evocative photographs--and her personal favorite--is one of pianist Brendel during a 1988 lecture on Schubert’s later sonatas at the Schoenberg Institute at USC. “When there’s no forced expression, the personality disappears, and the essence comes out. When I can get that, it’s a successful photograph.”

As another example, Freeman points out a photograph of a smiling Sylvain Cambreling. The French conductor “almost never smiles like this--he’s smiling for the camera,” she says. She sets it aside, disappears and returns with a second photograph of a more somber Cambreling. “This,” she says, “is Sylvain. It’s the same 15 minutes, but I stopped the smile.”

Freeman says she initially learned from her own mistakes, then studied photography seriously at weeklong workshops with such people as Ansel Adams and Cole Weston.

Over the years, her photos have appeared as album cover art, in CD booklets, concert programs, books, newspapers and magazines. And the Bowl exhibition is her 30th; her photos have been on display in such cities as New York, Tokyo, Berlin, Salzburg and Venice.

For Freeman, the artistry of the photographs is intricately affected by the artistry of their subjects.

“Great music does two things,” Freeman says. “It elevates the heart and engages the intellect. My best photographs are of composers I care about most. If I have not been moved but merely impressed by the music, the photograph shows it.”

Chicago-born, Freeman was raised in Brooklyn and New Rochelle, N.Y., the daughter of a math teacher and a chemical engineer. She took piano lessons for several years as a child, but she abandoned them as many kids do. It was in college that music really captured her. At Wellesley College, she remembers, “every day I had to pass Billings Hall, the old music building, and I could hear everybody practicing instruments. I got this terrible longing to go back to music.”

She began taking piano lessons again, paying for them out of her allowance. She studied theory and piano privately after college graduation, continuing her studies after moving to California in 1950 and while raising the four children from a first marriage that ended in divorce.

Freeman says she practiced six to eight hours almost daily until one day, after 20 years of study, “I performed for friends as I had always wished to play, closed the piano and never touched it again. What happened was I realized how much more there was ahead of me to be a concert pianist, and knew I couldn’t--I wouldn’t--do it.”

Instead, she began to foster the muse in others, both directly and indirectly. A prominent collector of Abstract Expressionist art in the 1950s and ‘60s, she has also written unpublished books about painters Clyfford Still and Sam Francis.

Her art world contacts led her back to music through their fundraising efforts to help La Monte Young, a groundbreaking minimalist. Freeman contributed $100, and later, Young sent her tapes of his work. They were, she says, “‘my introduction to contemporary music. It was a good one and of lasting influence. After my exposure to La Monte’s music, all other composers seemed conservative.”

From 1964 to 1973, Freeman helped produce and subsidize the Encounters concert series at the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum of Art). Through that work, she says, she met Cage, Boulez and many other composers she went on to support or commission.

Among them was “the great original” California composer Harry Partch, who invented his own microtonal music theory, made his own instruments and wrote six operas. Until he died in 1974, she found studios for Partch, drove him from place to place, bought his house for him, helped get his last opera produced at UCLA--”doing everything Harry needed.”

On Dec. 25, 1979, Freeman married her second husband, artist Franco Assetto, at the Candlelight Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas. Starting in 1981, she and Assetto hosted now-legendary musical salons in their art-filled living room.

The musicales featured talks, tapes or performances from such notables as Adams, Salonen, Robert Wilson and Steve Reich, and fostered music community networking. The music was followed by pasta suppers prepared by Assetto, and the events ended shortly after he died in 1991. In 1989, she established her Freeman Fund for Contemporary American Music.

Freeman declines to answer questions about the source of her wealth and how much money she spends on her philanthropy--she says she kept no records. She knows she has produced 10 CDs but doesn’t know how many commissions she’s given. “And besides commissions,” she says, “I’ve given personal and producing and recording assistance to composers whose music I find convincing and compelling.”

John Adams dedicated his opera “Nixon in China” to her. John Cage honored her with the Freeman Etudes for solo violin. “The Etudes were just a gift,” Freeman says. “But I gave him an annual grant from 1964 until his death to do with as he wished.”

Looking back on the musicales and the commissions, Freeman says she photographs music-makers for the same reasons she supports them: “Composers are the most important people, infinitely more important to me than any politician. What matters are the seeds you plant for the future.”

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“Music People & Others,” Edmund D. Edelman Hollywood Bowl Museum. Tuesdays to Saturdays, 10 a.m.-8:30 p.m., through Sept. 18; Tuesdays to Saturdays, 10 a.m.-4:30 p.m., Sept. 19 through May 31. Ends May 31. Free. (213) 850-2058.