David Lewin - Biography

Biography

Lewin was born in New York City and studied piano from a young age. He graduated from Harvard in 1954 with a degree in mathematics. Lewin then studied theory and composition with Roger Sessions, Milton Babbitt, Edward Cone, and Earl Kim at Princeton University, earning an M.F.A. in 1958. He returned to Harvard as a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1958 to 1961. After holding teaching positions at the University of California, Berkeley (1961–67), the State University of New York at Stony Brook (1967–79), and Yale University (1979–85), he returned to Harvard as the Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Music in 1985. Lewin was a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow in 1983–84, served as the president of the Society for Music Theory from 1985 to 1988 and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received honorary doctoral degrees from the University of Chicago in 1995, from the New England Conservatory of Music in 2000, and posthumously from Université Marc Bloch de Strasbourg, France, in 2006.