Born in 1934 in Médanos, Buenos Aires, Mario Davidovsky began his musical studies at the age of seven, continued his education at the Collegium Musicium, and graduated from the Bartolomé Mitre School in Buenos Aires in 1952.
He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, director of the Koussevitzky Foundation at the Library of Congress, director of the Fromm Foundation at Harvard University, director of C.R.I., and founder and vice president of the Robert Miller Fund for Music. Fellowships have included the Koussevitzky Foundation Fellowship, the Williams Foundation Fellowship, the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. Davidovsky has received a Pulitzer Prize and awards from the Association Wagneriana, the Asociación Amigos de la Música, BMI, Brandeis University, and the National Institute of Arts.
Davidovsky has received numerous commissions, including ones from the Fromm Foundation, the Juilliard String Quartet, the Koussevitzky Foundation, Yale University, the New York Chamber Soloists, Parnassus, the Universities of Pennsylvania and Chicago, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Speculum Musicae, the San Francisco Symphony, MIT, the Naumburg Foundation, the Dorian Quintet, the Emerson Quartet, the New Music Consort, and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.
He is a professor of music at Harvard and Columbia Universities and chairman of the Electronic Music Center at Columbia University. Davidovsky has held visiting professorships at the University of Michigan, Yale University, City University, the Di Tella Institute (Argentina), the Manhattan School of Music, and the University of Pennsylvania.