Betty Freeman

Betty Freeman, one of the most influential individual patrons of contemporary composers over the last 40 years, and long the keeper of a famously gracious musical salon in Los Angeles, died on Saturday at her home in Beverly Hills. She was 87.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said her daughter Shelley Butler.

At a time when grants to composers are routinely processed through arts panels and advisory committees, Freeman was a throwback to an earlier era of patronage based on personal preferences. The composer John Adams, who dedicated his opera "Nixon in China" to Freeman, has long called her a "modern-day Medici."

Her selection of composers was "purely arbitrary and based solely on my response to their music," Freeman said in a 1998 interview in The New York Times. And her taste in contemporary music was wide-ranging.

She commissioned the French 12-tone master Pierre Boulez and the American maverick John Cage, the British modernist Harrison Birtwistle and the American minimalist Steve Reich. Reich's "Different Trains," written for the Kronos Quartet; Kaija Saariaho's opera "L'Amour de Loin," which had its premiere at the Salzburg Festival; Tod Machover's "Hyper-Violin Concerto," for the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group; and Lou Harrison's Piano Concerto, composed for Keith Jarrett, are among the hundreds of notable works Freeman commissioned from about 80 composers. She also underwrote performances and recordings.

In 1964, she met Harry Partch, the eclectic American composer and inventor of unconventional instruments, who, struggling to subsist, was nearly destitute. Freeman housed him and provided support for his work until his death in 1974. "That she could tune in on this guy who was virtually a hobo," Adams said in the 1998 New York Times article, "see the value of his work and put up with his crusty, abusive behavior for 10 years until he died is amazing."

Betty Wishnick, born in Chicago on June 2, 1921, moved with her family to Brooklyn, N.Y., and then to New Rochelle, N.Y., where she grew up. Her father, Robert I. Wishnick, the source of Freeman's wealth, was a successful chemical engineer who provided a role model of philanthropy with gifts to hospitals and educational institutions.