David Amram

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David Amram photo courtesy Doug Bowman.
David Amram photo courtesy Doug Bowman.

David Amram (born November 17, 1930) is an American composer, musician, and writer. His eclectic use of jazz (including being the first noted for jazz French horn), ethnic and folk music has led him to work with the likes of Thelonious Monk, Willie Nelson, Charles Mingus, Leonard Bernstein, and Jack Kerouac throughout the course of his career.

[edit] Career

Amram was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Shortly before his seventh birthday, he and his family moved to a farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. His grandfather, David Werner Amram, who had been active in early American Zionist circles and had spent considerable time in Palestine, taught him basic Hebrew. His father, Philip Werner Amram, introduced him to cantorial music and classical music. Amram's uncle loved jazz, introducing him to recordings of great jazz artists, and took him to see many of them in person.

At the age of seven, Amram began piano lessons, experimenting with trumpet and tuba before settling on the French horn. In 1948 he spent a year at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, but earned a bachelor's degree in European history from George Washington University in 1952. During those years, Amram was an extra horn player with the National Symphony Orchestra.

David Amram has composed more than 100 orchestral and chamber music works, written many scores for Broadway theater and film, including the classic scores for the films "Splendor in The Grass" and "The Manchurian Candidate;" two operas, including the ground-breaking Holocaust opera "The Final Ingredient;" and the score for the landmark 1959 documentary "Pull My Daisy," narrated by novelist Jack Kerouac. He is also the author of three books: the autobiography "Vibrations," and the memoirs "Offbeat: Collaborating With Kerouac" and "Upbeat: Nine Lives of a Musical Cat."

A pioneer player of jazz French horn, he is also a virtuoso on piano, numerous flutes and whistles, percussion, and dozens of folkloric instruments from 25 countries, as well as an inventive, funny improvisational lyricist. He has collaborated with Leonard Bernstein, who chose him as The New York Philharmonic's first composer-in-residence in 1966, Langston Hughes, Dizzy Gillespie, Dustin Hoffman, Willie Nelson, Thelonious Monk, Odetta, Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller, Charles Mingus, Lionel Hampton, E. G. Marshall, and Tito Puente. Amram's most recent work "Giants of the Night" is a flute concerto dedicated to the memory Charlie Parker, Jack Kerouac and Dizzy Gillespie, three American artists Amram knew and worked with. It was commissioned and premiered by Sir James Galway.

Today, as he has for over fifty years, Amram continues to compose music while traveling the world as a conductor, soloist, bandleader, visiting scholar, and narrator in five languages. He is also currently working with author Frank McCourt on a new setting of the Mass, "Missa Manhattan,".

On September 29, 2007, Symphony Silicon Valley opened its sixth season at the California Theater in San Jose, California with Amram's "Symphonic Variations on a Song by Woody Guthrie", a work commission by the Guthrie family several years prior to its premiere. The song referred to in Amram's title is the Guthrie song - "This Land is Your Land" - and each of the symphony's six movements paints a picture of America's landscape during Guthrie's time.[1] The San Jose Symphony has also commissioned him to compose a new piano concerto.[citation needed]

His former summer home was Davis Park, Fire Island.


All his concert music is published by C.F. Peters Corporation (B.M.I.)

[edit] Discography

[edit] As leader

[edit] As contributor

[edit] Books by David Amram

[edit] References

  1. ^ Bratman, David. Variations on This Land. San Francisco Classical Voice, Sept. 29, 2007. Retrieved Nov. 5, 2007.
  • Douglas Brinkley writing in the introduction to Vibrations: The Adventures and Musical Times of David Amram (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2001) ISBN 1-56025-308-8

[edit] External links

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