He studied musicology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (M.Mus, 1983, Ph.D., 1987), where his teachers included Bruno Nettl, John Walter Hill, Nicholas Temperley, and Herbert Kellman.
His dissertation "The Opera Theater of Count Franz Anton von Sporck in Prague (1724–1735)" was revised and published in 1992 as the first monograph devoted to the musical cultural of eighteenth-century Prague or the Bohemian lands ever written in English.
No other musicologist of any nationality has succeeded in completing three separate monographs on the same subject matter.
[4] Besides his monographs, Freeman has published essays on Italian opera of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, eighteenth-century keyboard music, and the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Johann Sebastian Bach, the Bach sons, Antonio Vivaldi, and Josquin des Prez.
Freeman's essay "An 18th-Century Singer’s Commission of ‘Baggage’ Arias," originally published in the journal Early Music in 1992, was re-printed as a classic study about baroque opera in Opera Remade, 1700–1750 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).