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Mario Davidovsky, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer who opened up new vistas in chamber music by pairing live acoustic instruments with electronics, died on Friday at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 85.
The cause was heart failure, his son, Matias, said.
Like many of his fellow composers in the 1950s and ’60s, Mr. Davidovsky was drawn to the new possibilities offered by technology. But he was uneasy with the prospect of music that was immune to human interpretation.
Beginning in 1963 with “Synchronisms No. 1” for flute and tape, he coaxed electronic sounds into partnership with traditional instruments to create musical pas-de-deux that were full of mystery and drama. His “Synchronisms No. 6” for piano and electronic sounds won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1971.
The composer Eric Chasalow, who studied with him beginning in 1977, said in a phone interview that Mr. Davidovsky was among the first “to make electronics nuanced the way a violin is,” adding, “He tried to make the electronic an extension of the organic.”
That process began at the edge of an instrument’s natural capabilities. A piano, for instance, cannot sustain sound: Once struck, a note decays. “Synchronisms No. 6” begins with an unassuming single G on the piano. As the sound begins to wilt, it is joined imperceptibly by the tape, which stretches and swells the note in space. As the music unfolds, electronics function like a genie granting the instrument supernatural powers.
‘He didn’t want to be someone who contributed to the dissolution of the human being onstage.’
Mari Kimura, a violinist and composer who studied with Mr. Davidovsky in the early 1990s, recalled the first time she heard that initial hybrid G. “I almost fell off the chair,” she said. “I thought, I have to do that with my violin. I had never heard anything like that before.”
Beginning in the late 1970s, Mr. Davidovsky shifted his focus back to purely acoustic music. With their meticulous attention to tone color, rhythmic quirks and dazzling varieties of attack, works like “Festino” for mixed ensemble, from 1994, sound uncannily as if they are enhanced by electronic wizardry.
“He wrestled with this idea that he didn’t want to be someone who contributed to the dissolution of the human being onstage,” the guitarist Dan Lippel, who has performed both “Festino” and “Synchronisms No. 10” for guitar and electronic sounds, said. “He was a real humanist.”
Above all, Mr. Davidovsky would say, composition was an ethical act. That was a point he argued passionately as a teacher, especially as mentor to the participants in the Composers Conference, a new-music summer program he headed from 1968 until his death, which is now held at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. He urged musicians to consider the moral implications of their art.
Through his students, Mr. Davidovsky followed the developments of music technology with curiosity, even as he focused on writing for traditional forces. In some ways his “Synchronisms No. 6” prefigured digital advances in interactive electronics. Much of the time, it sounds as if the tape is responding to the live piano.
Mario Davidovskywas born on March 4, 1934, in Médanos, a small town with a large immigrant population in the south of Argentina. His parents were observant Jews who came from Eastern Europe. Natalio Davidovsky was the general manager of a Belgian agricultural company; Perla (Bulanska) Davidovsky was a Hebrew-school teacher who would pick scholarly arguments with rabbis and counted a priest among her close friends.
In addition to his son, an investment banker, Mr. Davidovsky is survived by a daughter, Adriana Davidovsky; a sister, Luisa Paz; and three grandchildren. His wife, Elaine Joyce (Blaustein) Davidovsky, whom he married in 1962, died in 2017.
In conversations, Mr. Davidovsky remembered the Médanos of his childhood as a place of easy coexistence, peopled with characters seemingly drawn from commedia dell’arte. On Sundays there were dances; on national holidays people came together to play the national march.
He started violin lessons at age 7 and composing when he was about 10. His family later moved to Buenos Aires, where he studied law at the university before turning his full attention to composition, in 1954. A principal teacher was the German-born conductor Teodoro Fuchs. Among Mr. Davidovsky’s fellow students were Mauricio Kagel, who went on to become a leading composer of the avant-garde, and the pianist Martha Argerich.
In an unpublished interview with the composer Martin Brody and the musicologist Anne C. Shreffler, Mr. Davidovsky remembered coming to his lessons an hour early so he could Ms. Argerich, already a virtuoso at 12, play. “She just burned up the keyboard,” he said.
In 1958 Aaron Copland invited Mr. Davidovsky to spend a summer at what is now the Tanglewood Music Center after hearing a recording of his music. There he met Milton Babbitt, the noted composer of serial and electronic music, who was on the cusp of forming the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York City. In 1960 Mr. Davidovsky moved to America to join the center. Working alongside the Turkish composer Bulent Arel, he refined studio techniques for handling tapes that made it possible to sculpt electronic sounds.
The sounds were created with audio equipment, including oscillators, that created tunable sound waves. Editing involved splicing magnetic tape using rulers, razor blades and splicing blocks.
“He really enjoyed the kind of hands-on approach” Dr. Chasalow said of Mr. Davidovsky’s work at the Electronic Music Center. “There was a craftsmanship to that.”
Mr. Davidovsky often likened his early experiments to “the challenge of being left in the desert for a few days with a knife and a jug of water,” Dr. Chasalow said.
From 1981 to 1994 Mr. Davidovsky directed the Electronic Music Center. He taught at the University of Michigan, the Manhattan School of Music and Yale University, and served on the faculties of the City College of New York, Columbia University and Harvard. He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1982.
In addition to his electro-acoustic compositions, Mr. Davidovsky’s output included string quartets and works for mixed chamber ensemble. He wrote only a few works for orchestra, including a Concertante for string quartet and orchestra that alludes to Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge.” In his vocal writing, he often drew on biblical texts.
He was fascinated by music’s ability to unify voices. In his satyr-like “Duo Capriccioso” for violin and piano, he found areas of overlap between the instruments’ expressive registers, where they form a new hybrid alloy of sound.
“Music is the summation, the aggregate, of all the choices, all we do. It’s a chaotic enterprise, a degree of understanding,” Mr. Davidovsky told José-Luis Hurtado, a Mexican composer who studied with him at Harvard, in a recorded conversation. “It is like being monotheist. It is like the kind of language that you may eventually use to see the face of God.”
