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Mario Davidovsky (born March 4, 1934) is an Argentine-American composer. Born in Argentina, he emigrated in 1960 to the US, where he lives today. He is best known for his series of compositions called Synchronisms, which in live performance incorporate both acoustic instruments and electroacoustic sounds played from a tape.
Davidovsky was born in Médanos, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina, a town nearly 600 km southwest of the city of Buenos Aires and close to the seaport of BahÃa Blanca. He is a first-generation Argentinian, his family having emigrated there from Lithuania. Along with the surrounding South American culture, including a strong agrarian economy and Catholic faith, his family's European values and Jewish history shaped his growth and education. At 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, from which he eventually graduated.
In 1958, he studied with Aaron Copland and Milton Babbitt at the Berkshire Music Center (now the Tanglewood Music Center) in Lenox, 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.
During the early 1960s, he established himself internationally as a pioneer in electroacoustic music with his three Electronic Studies and the first few of his twelve Synchronisms. Synchronisms No. 6 would win him the Pulitzer Prize in 1971.
In addition to composing, Davidovsky worked as Edgard Varèse's technician. Varèse would describe the sounds that he was looking for, and Davidovsky would help him configure the equipment in the lab to produce those sounds. Varèse and Davidovsky became close friends, and when Varèse died in 1965, Davidovsky dedicated his Electronic Study No. 3 to him.
Davidovsky continued to compose electroacoustic music until the mid-1970s, when he turned to writing music to be played solely on traditional instruments, including voice. As noted by Crumb, electroacoustic music has had an effect on the larger tradition, and certainly in Davidovsky's non-electronic music the effects are clear: much attention is given to the quality of attack, sustain, and decay of the instruments, which requires special skill of the performer.[citation needed]
Most of his published compositions since the 1970s have been nonelectronic. His only published electroacoustic compositions since that time are Synchronisms No. 9 (1988) and Synchronisms No. 10 (1992). 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.[citation needed] In 1994 he became professor of music at Harvard. During his career, Davidovsky has 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), City College of New York (1968-80).
In 1982, Davidovsky was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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