The composer Fred Lerdahl studied at Lawrence University, Princeton, and Tanglewood. He has taught at UC/Berkeley, Harvard, and Michigan, and is the Fritz Reiner Professor of Music at Columbia University. He has received numerous honors for his music, including the Koussevitzky Composition Prize, two composer awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

The chamber work Time after Time was a finalist for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in music. Commissions have come from the Fromm Foundation, the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Spoleto Festival, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and others. Among the organizations that have performed his works are the New York Philharmonic, the Pittsburgh Symphony, the San Francisco Symphony, the Seattle Symphony, the Cincinnati Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the American Composers Orchestra, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Collage, Eighth Blackbird, Speculum Musicae, the Juilliard Quartet, and the Pro Arte Quartet. He has been in residence at the Marlboro Music Festival, IRCAM, the Wellesley Composers Conference, the American Academy in Rome, the Bowdoin Music Festival, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Lerdahl is also known as a music theorist. With linguist Ray Jackendoff he wrote A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, which models musical listening from the perspective of cognitive science. He has continued to develop this theory in numerous articles and has recently published a second book entitled Tonal Pitch Space.