Mario Davidovsky

Biography

Mario Davidovsky (March 4, 1934 – August 23, 2019) was an Argentine-American composer. Born in Argentina, he emigrated in 1960 to the United States, where he lived for the remainder of his life. He is best known for his series of Synchronisms, which incorporate acoustic instruments and pre-recorded electronic sounds played from a tape.

Biography

Davidovsky was born in Médanos, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina, on March 4, 1934, to Lithuanian Jewish immigrant parents. Aged seven, he began his musical studies on the violin. At thirteen he began composing. He studied composition and theory under Guillermo Graetzer at the University of Buenos Aires.
In 1958, he studied with Aaron Copland and Milton Babbitt at Tanglewood in Massachusetts. Through Babbitt, who worked at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, and others, Davidovsky developed an interest in electroacoustic music. Copland encouraged Davidovsky to emigrate to the United States, and in 1960, Davidovsky settled in New York City, where he was appointed associate director of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. It was at that time he began to compose the Synchronisms series of electroacoustic works. Synchronisms No. 6 for piano and tape won the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for Music.
Most of his published compositions since the 1970s were non-electronic. His only published electroacoustic compositions for much of that time were Synchronisms No. 9 (1988) and Synchronisms No. 10 (1992). However, Davidovsky received a commission by a group led by the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States (SEAMUS) to compose two more Synchronisms, and No. 11 and No. 12 premiered in 2007 at the SEAMUS National Conference in Ames, Iowa.
Davidovsky's association with the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center continued, and from 1981 to 1993 he was the lab's director as well as professor of music at Columbia. In 1994, he became professor of music at Harvard University. Davidovsky also taught at many other institutions: University of Michigan (1964), the Di Tella Institute of Buenos Aires (1965), the Manhattan School of Music (1968–69), Yale University (1969–70), and the City College of New York (1968–80). He also served on the composition faculty of the Mannes School of Music.
In 1982, Davidovsky was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Personal life

Davidovsky married Elaine Blaustein in 1962; she died in 2017. They had two children and three grandchildren. He died in New York City on August 23, 2019, at the age of 85.

Fellowships

Koussevitzky Foundation fellowship (1958)
Rockefeller Foundation fellowship (1963, 1964)
Guggenheim Fellowship (1960, 1971)
Williams Foundation Fellowship
Walter Channing Cabot Fellowship