Don Freund (born 1947, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is an American composer, pianist, and Professor of Composition at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.

He has received several awards for his work, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.

[1] Don Freund began his professorship in 1972 as chair of Memphis State University's composition department.

[1] 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, form harmony to scales.