Musicians - Mario Davidovsky

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	Musicians - Mario Davidovsky

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 under the name Synchronisms which during live performance incorporate both acoustic instruments and electro-acoustic sounds played from a tape. (electro-acoustic music is also called electronic music.)

Biography

Davidovsky was born in Médanos, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina; a town nearly 600km 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 by learning to play the violin. At thirteen he began composing. He studied composition and theory under Guillermo Graetzer at the University of Buenos Aires where 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 Milton Babbitt, who worked at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, and others, Davidovsky developed an interest in electro-acoustic 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 electro-acoustic music with his three compositions under the name Electronic Study and the first few of his ten compositions under the name Synchronisms for which he is best known. His Synchronisms No. 6 would win him the Pulitzer Prize in 1971. While the Electronic Studys were purely electro-acoustic, each of the Synchronisms is performed by one or more musicians playing traditional instruments while a tape machine plays back recorded electro-acoustic music previously created in the laboratory. The live performer partially serves to warm the audience to the electro-acoustic side of the composition. The performer also adds a certain vitality to the piece since a purely electro-acoustic piece is never truly performed.

Many of the people working in electro-acoustic composition survived by the medium's novelty. Davidovsky did not work this way, and an extended quote from George Crumb adds much to the discussion:

:"Perhaps we might now review some of the specific technical accoutrements of our present music and speculate on their potential for future development. 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." (see References)

Davidovsky worked to solve the "composer's major problems." The electronic medium gave new means 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 literally cut up recordings with razor blades, and piece them back together in various ways with the aim to control these aspects of the sound. He used his ear as a test of the quality of each new creation, and working in this way, he built a vocabulary to be used in composition.

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