Gary William Friedman

Gary William Friedman is an American composer whose work spans musical theatre, symphonic and operatic composition, film and television scoring, and liturgical music. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, he led a band and played saxophone at Abraham Lincoln High School before studying composition at Brooklyn College under Hall Overton and Jan Meyerowitz. He later pursued electronic music composition with Vladimir Ussachevsky at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center following the completion of his post-graduate studies in education.

Friedman's professional career took shape in New York City during the early 1960s, when he performed as a saxophonist and became a central member of the Free-Form Improvisational Ensemble alongside Burton Greene and Alan Silva. In September 1964, the group appeared in concert at Town Hall in New York City, where Friedman's Benjamin, A Brass Quintet received its world premiere. During the same period, he began composing scores for experimental theater, contributing music to plays by Paul Foster, Tom Eyen, and Jean-Claude van Itallie at Ellen Stewart's La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club.

His first major theatrical success came with The Me Nobody Knows, a 1970 musical with lyrics by Will Holt and Herb Schapiro. The show opened Off-Broadway in 1969 and won the Obie Award for Best Music of a Musical before transferring to Broadway in 1971, where it received five Tony Award nominations, including Best Score. Friedman also received the Drama Desk Award for Most Promising Musical Writer in 1970 in connection with the production. The show was subsequently staged in cities including Hamburg, London, Paris, and Johannesburg. Two songs from the score achieved commercial success as pop singles: "Light Sings," recorded by The 5th Dimension, and "This World," recorded by The Staples Singers. In 1980, the musical was produced as a Showtime television special introduced and hosted by James Earl Jones.

Friedman's second Broadway credit was Platinum in 1978. His Off-Broadway work includes Taking My Turn, with lyrics by Will Holt, which won the Outer Critics Circle Award in 1983 and was later presented on PBS's Great Performances with a cast that included Margaret Whiting, Marni Nixon, and Cissy Houston. Additional Off-Broadway productions include Sunset, Bring In The Morning, Sheba, and Love, Linda: The Life of Mrs. Cole Porter, for which Friedman served as co-author and arranger.

Beyond the stage, Friedman composed more than 60 songs for PBS's children's television series The Electric Company, serving as music director beginning in 1975. Among those songs was the widely recognized "Spider-Man Theme Song." His film and television scoring credits include Full Moon High (1981), starring Alan Arkin and Adam Arkin; Who Gets The Friends (1988), starring Lucie Arnaz and Jill Clayburgh; and Bump In The Night (1991), starring Christopher Reeve.

Friedman's orchestral and operatic compositions have been commissioned and performed at venues including the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Lancaster Music Festival, the Columbus Symphony, and Encompass New Opera Theatre. His symphonic works include the opera Mordecai, which premiered at the Kosciushko Foundation in New York City in 1979; Haskalah, premiered with the Columbus Symphony in 1984; and Ligeia, a chamber work inspired by the Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name, which received its world premiere in October 2011 with the Pit Stop Players at The DiMenna Center for the Arts in New York City. His liturgical compositions include An American S'Lichot, a Hebrew choral and orchestral work performed annually at synagogues throughout the United States on the S'lichot holy day. A selection of his symphonic works was recorded and released on the CD Colloquy in 2008 by 150 Music.

Friedman has also taught music professionally, working as a licensed teacher in the New York City public school system, instructing an advanced course in music for film at Carnegie Mellon University in 1985, and teaching writing for theater at UCLA in 1993. He has co-produced and composed original material for jazz recordings with his wife, vocalist and lyricist Stevie Holland, whom he married in 1999. Their album Before Love Has Gone was selected by USA Today as a Top CD of the Year in 2008. Friedman has two children from his first marriage to Barbara Ellen Miller, who died in 1997.