David Amram

From Philosopedia

Amram conducting his first symphony in 1967

Amram, David (Werner) (17 Nov 1930 - )

Amram is a composer, conductor, and musician. He was the first composer-in-residence of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra (1966-1967); composed incidental music for the New York Shakespeare Festival (1956-1967); wrote a Holocaust opera,The Final Ingredien; and composed music for such films as The Manchurian Candidate and Splendor in the Grass. Accomplished on the French horn, he also plays piano, guitar, numerous flutes and all kinds of bells and whistles, combining symphony, jazz, and folk music with audience participation.

For Paddy Chayevsky’s Joseph D on Broadway, he was a one-person symphony as well as choir, performing almost all the instruments and singing the soprano as well as the bass voices.

With the author Frank McCourt he worked in 2000 on a musical work, Missa Manhattan. He often appears at benefits, for homeless children and for other causes he finds important to support. Amram has estimated that he has worked seventy or eighty benefits with Paul Krassner, The Realist editor.

In his Vibrations: Adventures and Musical Times of David Amram (1968), he describes having worked with Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, Leonard Bernstein, and the major Beatnick writers. He was musical accompanist at the historic 1957 first-ever Jazz-Poetry reading in New York with Jack Kerouac. Broadcast Music Incorporated has cited him as “one of twenty most performed composers of concern music in the United States.” He is acknowledged as a pioneer member of world music and multi-cultural symphonic programming. Tina Kelley, in a New York Times interview (8 June 2000) after Amram’s farmhouse in Putnam Valley, New York, was nearly destroyed, was told how important improvisation is in music:

• If you stay in the music for the true meaning of the music—which is a celebration of life and a sharing of good feelings and a sensitivity toward others and realizing that like life itself, anything can happen at any moment—your job as a musician, even a composer or conductor, is to turn a catastrophe into something beautiful, and to become, as Muhammad Ali said, a master of disaster.

Asked his outlook about humanism and religion, Amram, one of the best-known of the Beat Generation, responded jocularly to Warren Allen Smith, who as co-owner of Variety Recording Studio in the 1960s and 1970s had not only recorded much of his music but also financed and sent LPs of his work to leading musical figures:

• I’m a hyperactive member of the Jewish faith, in the grand tradition of the wandering Klezmer-philosophers, who rejoiced in the beauty of each new day and walked humbly on God’s great Mother Earth. All good things in life celebrate the spirit. I believe I’ll be reincarnated as an eggplant, which is why I’m becoming a vegetarian again, to prepare my new career.

Original letter is in Harvard's Houghton Library

(See Amram's homepage.)

{WAS, 23 April 1998, 5 May 1998, numerous conversations in the 1960s and 1970s}