David Lewin

David Lewin was born in New York in 1933. He studied piano from an early age and later trained with Eduard Steuermann, a noted interpreter of Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School. After earning a degree in mathematics from Harvard in 1954, he spent a year in Vienna studying music theory and analysis with Josef Polnauer. He returned to the United States to complete an M.F.A. in composition at Princeton University, where he studied with Roger Sessions, Milton Babbitt, and Edward T. Cone. 

In 1961, while serving as a Junior Fellow at Harvard, David Lewin was invited by engineer Max Mathews to experiment with the MUSIC IV system at Bell Laboratories. Mathews had developed the program to convert digital instructions into sound and sought a composer capable of exploring its creative potential. Lewin learned to code in Fortran II, sending programs from Cambridge to Bell Labs in New Jersey, where they were translated into punch cards and converted into analog sound. The resulting studies, included on the Bell Labs record Music from Mathematics, represented the first music composed and realized entirely by a professional composer using a computer.

Lewin’s collaboration at Bell Laboratories marked a turning point in his understanding of composition. Programming sound through algorithms revealed to him how musical relationships could be modeled and transformed through systems of logic. When he joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1961, this perspective informed his teaching and his music. He composed works that examined structure and perception, and he encouraged students to approach theory as a creative act. In the following decades, through appointments at Stony Brook, Yale, and Harvard, he developed a body of writing that would redefine modern music theory, linking mathematical reasoning with the experience of listening.

His professional life unfolded between composing, performing, and writing. He gave piano recitals, played chamber music, and in 1966 directed a performance of Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire in San Francisco. His analytical writings earned him wide recognition, including fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations and the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. His books Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations and Musical Form and Transformation became essential references in contemporary music theory. Lewin passed away in 2003.