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 [es] 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.
