David Lewin


David Benjamin Lewin 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.

Biography

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 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, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and Yale University, 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.

Composition

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.

Criticism

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. During the late 1970s, Lewin's work in this area became more explicitly concerned with issues in literary theory; he published articles in 19th-Century Music. Studies in Music with Text, published posthumously, demonstrates Lewin's concerns in this area while also synthesizing his critical/theoretical methods.

Theory

David Lewin's work in music theory was both influential and eclectic. Broadly, his writings can be divided into three overlapping groups: formal or mathematically based theory, more interpretive writing on the interaction of music and text, and metatheoretical discussions on the methodology and purpose of contemporary music theory.
The first group includes his innovations in transformational theory, as expressed in numerous articles and in his treatise Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations. In this work, Lewin applied group theory to music, investigating the basic concepts, interval and transposition, and extending them beyond their traditional application to pitch. Based on a powerful metaphor of musical space, this theory can be applied to pitch, rhythm and metre, or even timbre. Moreover, it can be applied to both tonal and atonal repertories.
Lewin's writing on the relationship between text and music in song and opera involves composers from Mozart and Wagner, to Schoenberg and Babbitt. In one interesting example, "Music Analysis as Stage Direction," he discusses how structural aspects of the music can suggest dramatic interpretations.
Important writings for the discipline of music theory include "Behind the Beyond", a response to Edward Cone, and "Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception". Lewin also undertakes considerable methodological and disciplinary reflection in writings that are chiefly oriented around other claims. This aspect of Lewin's intellectual style is evident as early as "A Theory of Segmental Association in Twelve-Tone Music".
Lewin often makes clear which dense sections can be skipped by readers unfamiliar with mathematics, and connects his abstract theory to practical musical considerations, such as performance and music perception. For example, in Musical Form and Transformation: Four Analytic Essays, Lewin provides ear-training exercises to develop an ability to hear more difficult musical relationships. Posthumously, in 2003, a symposium on David Lewin's theories was conducted at the Mannes Institute for Advanced Studies in Music Theory. Lewin's papers are now held at the Library of Congress.

Publication list