Born in 1934 in Médanos, Buenos Aires, Mario Davidovsky began his musical studies at the ago 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, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and the Walter Channing Cabot 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 those 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, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and others.

Davidovsky is the Fanny P. Mason Professor of Music, Emeritus, at Harvard University. He is the former Director of the Columbia/Princeton Electronic Music Center and MacDowell Professor of Music at Columbia University. He has served for 29 years as the Director of the Composers' Conference at Wellesley. He 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.