David Amram’s personal history is the stuff of creative and artistic legend. His accomplishments read like a dog-eared musicology textbook. He has composed over a hundred orchestral and chamber music works, written an opera about the Holocaust called “The Final Ingredient”, conducted the New York Chamber Orchestra and many other orchestras, composed film scores including “The Manchurian Candidate” and “Splendor in the Grass”, pioneered the French horn as a jazz instrument, and authored three books. He studied and learned the music of a multitude of cultures before World Music was even a term. Amram’s performing credentials are no less impressive. The short list of artists he has performed and worked with includes Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Floyd Red Crow Westerman, Odetta, Jack Kerouac, Leonard Bernstein, Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and Willie Nelson.

Amram grew up on a farm in Feasterville, Pennsylvania, a small rural town near Philadelphia. His fondest childhood memories are of milking cows, planting corn, and other farm chores. He played his first musical notes on a Boy Scout bugle at the age of six, and began trumpet and piano lessons shortly thereafter. In time, the family sold the farm and moved to Washington, DC where Amram spent his teen years. During high school, he began learning to play the French horn, an instrument whose tone inspired and enchanted him. Following high school and a few years of college, Amram enlisted in the Army, continued to study music and saw Europe for the first time. His journey had begun.

Recently, Amram spent a very busy week in Austin, Texas. While there at the invitation of the Austin Jewish Film Festival to screen a documentary about his life, he also worked with local musicians and performed two concerts. During an interview graciously squeezed in between time slots with the director of the Austin Civic Orchestra and a San Antonio radio personality, he shared his wisdom, opinions, and insight on a number of topics near and dear to his heart.

Meeting and talking with David Amram was, for this interviewer, a deeply rewarding experience. He was gracious and humble, and demonstrated a natural politeness and good humor which was never forced or forgotten. Most significant was his effortless celebration of ‘the other’. The other musician, other artist, or other person in his company, received his accolades and positive recognition. While pragmatic about the harsher aspects of life, Amram directs much of his energy, talent, and emphasis toward the positive. By focusing on the gifts that others have to offer, Amram lifts himself up in the process and his creativity flows as a result.

From a very early age, Amram fostered a deep respect for the music of other cultures. He attributes his appreciation for and interest in diversity to the influence of his uncle. “My uncle was a merchant seaman,” he recalled of his father’s brother. “He acquainted me, as a little boy, with the fact that Columbus was right, that the world wasn’t flat and that you could go to different places and instead of falling off the edge into an abyss, you could fall into something beautiful and worthwhile, educational and spiritually enriching,” Amram said.

To a boy, stories of faraway lands and exotic cultures must have seemed like fantasy, but another uncle who was “brought up with American Indian people,” instilled in young Amram the importance of recognizing his country, while not losing sight of his own Jewish culture. Amram was reminded to, “think about who was here before us, and realize we were people who came from another place and were living in a special place… If we learned about that,” he continued, “then we could check out our own heritage and the heritages of everybody else as well, all who were living in this great Indian Country.”

The encouragement to explore and learn tapped into Amram’s innate curiosity. However, he clarified, “It was more (about) being open-minded and trying to relate to something that touched my heart. If something really moved me, I said, ‘boy, I’ve gotta get close to that’.” Most times, in an effort to get close to the things which touched his heart, Amram simply asked. “Anybody can really do anything if you devote yourself and humble yourself to being with those who know more than you, and can help you to continue to improve,” he asserted. “And the great thing about music is you never get it right. So that, in itself, keeps you hopping trying to learn how to do it while you’re still here.”

Having knowledge of other cultures and musical traditions was just the beginning for Amram. When his skill at playing a newly learned piece of music improved, his creativity and imagination took the music a step further. “As a classical composer over the years, I realized I could honor what was essentially a gift to me from other people,” Amram elaborated. “If I used even one note of anything traditional, I put in the score who taught it to me, where I learned it from, and what it was about, just as a thank you for a gift, rather than stealing something. And secondly,” he added, “to use that as a source for inspiration, to take it from there and go someplace else, and to kind of share it.”

Examples of traditional music can be found throughout Amram’s classical work. His “Symphonic Variations on a Song by Woody Guthrie” alone includes elements of traditional Native American, Mexican, and Cuban music, among others. “Part of my thank you is to try to share what I do know about (cultural music) with other people as a way, kind of like the principle of organic farming, of putting something back into that soil from which you get your nourishment,” he said.

During a recent concert performance billed as world music, Amram and his band took the audience on a musical journey which traversed more than a dozen disparate cultures. Alongside the Chinese, Egyptian, and Native American sounds which were heard that evening, Amram also featured his own culture by including several traditional Jewish pieces. He later explained his motivation for sharing that part of himself. “It wasn’t, ‘here’s some guy doing music from 19 cultures, but he’s avoiding the culture he was born into’,” Amram said flatly. “By necessity, I think, you have to include that to have any validity to dare to think you can represent anybody else.”

“Part of the problem, until recently, in this country was,” Amram continued, “almost everyone had to have a self-denial of where they came from as they moved up the ladder… Here, you can do anything, be anything, change your name, have 24 identities. It’s wonderful having that freedom. But,” he asserted, “if you forget your parents, your grandparents, your great-grandparents, or where you came from, you don’t have much of a place to go to. So, part of that is to honor your own family and your own heritage or heritages, even if you find others that you like more, not to give up on those.”