David Lewin

David Benjamin Lewin (July 2, 1933 – May 5, 2003) was an American music theorist, music critic and composer. Called "the most original and far-ranging theorist of his generation", he did his most influential theoretical work on the development of transformational theory, which involves the application of mathematical group theory to music. Lewin was born in New York City and studied piano from a young age and was for a time a pupil of Eduard Steuermann. He graduated from Harvard in 1954 with a degree in mathematics. Lewin then studied theory and composition with Roger Sessions, Milton Babbitt, Edward T. 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 Fellowship grantee 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. While Lewin is primarily known as a theorist, he was also an active composer who wrote works for a wide range of forces, from solo voice to full orchestra. In 1961, he became the first professional musician to compose a computer-generated piece at Bell Laboratories. Lewin's theoretical work may best be understood against his background in 1950/60s avant-garde compositional circles on the North American East Coast. Most of those composers, such as Benjamin Boretz, Edward T. Cone, and Milton Babbitt, were also music critics and theorists/analysts.