Mario Davidovsky - Biography

Biography

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 Bahía 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 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. While the Electronic Studies were purely electroacoustic, each of the Synchronisms is performed by one or more musicians playing traditional instruments while a tape machine plays back recorded electroacoustic music previously created in a laboratory. The live performer partially serves to warm the audience to the electroacoustic side of the composition. The performer also adds a certain vitality to the piece since a purely electroacoustic piece is never truly performed.

Many of the people working in electroacoustic composition survived on the medium's novelty. Davidovsky did not work this way; in the words of George Crumb:

The advent of electronically synthesized sound after World War II has unquestionably had enormous influence on music in general. Although I have never been directly involved in electronic music, I am keenly aware that our sense for sound characteristics, articulation, texture, and dynamics has been radically revised and very much affects the way in which we write for instruments. And since I have always been interested in the extension of the possibilities of instrumental idiom, I can only regard the influence of electronics as beneficial. I recently participated in a discussion with Mario Davidovsky, who, in my opinion, is the most elegant of all the electronic composers whose music I know. Davidovsky's view is that the early electronic composers had a truly messianic feeling concerning the promise of this new medium. In those euphoric days of intense experimentation, some composers felt that electronic music, because of its seemingly unlimited possibilities, would eventually replace conventional music. Davidovsky now regards the medium simply as a unique and important language at the disposal of any composer who wants to make use of it, and as a valuable teaching tool for the ear. In any case, it is obvious that the electronic medium in itself solves none of the composer's major problems, which have to do with creating a viable style, inventing distinguished thematic material, and articulating form.

Davidovsky worked to solve the "composer's major problems." The electronic medium provided new means by which to control the primal elements of sound: attack, sustain, and decay—aspects that had not previously played a major role in music. Working in the lab, Davidovsky would cut up tapes with razor blades and piece them back together in various ways to control these aspects of the sound. He used his ear to test the quality of each new creation, and working in this way, built a compositional vocabulary.

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.

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). However, Davidovsky received a commission by a group led by SEAMUS to compose two more electroacoustic works in the Synchronisms series. No. 11 and No. 12 premiered in 2007 at the SEAMUS National Conference in Ames, IA.

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. 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), and the City College of New York (1968–80).

He serves on the composition faculty of Mannes College The New School for Music.

In 1982, Davidovsky was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.