David Behrman

David Behrman, born in Salzburg on 16 August 1937, is an American composer whose work lies at the intersection of electronic music, dance and sound installation. Although he was born in Austria, his training and career took place in the United States, where he studied at Harvard University, graduating in 1959, and at Columbia University, where he earned a master's degree in 1963.

In 1966 he co-founded the Sonic Arts Union with Robert Ashley, Alvin Lucier and Gordon Mumma, a collective that performed live electronic works across North America and Europe until 1976. In the late 1960s he produced the Music of Our Time series for the Columbia Masterworks label, which brought together music by composers such as John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Henri Pousseur. Between 1970 and 1976 he toured as composer and performer with Merce Cunningham's dance company, for which he wrote pieces such as For Nearly an Hour (1968), Voice with Melody-Driven Electronics (1975) and Interspecies Smalltalk (1984). He was co-director of the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College from 1975 to 1980, and he taught at Ohio State University, Rutgers University and the California Institute of the Arts. In the 1980s he worked as a consultant on the design of educational music software for the Children's Television Workshop. He received grants from the Japan-United States Friendship Commission, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

From the mid-1970s onwards, his compositions have incorporated live performers who interact with computer-controlled musical systems, as in Refractive Light (1991), Unforeseen Events (1991), QSRL (1994–97) and My Dear Siegfried… (1996). His sound installations, among them Cloud Music (1974–79) and In Thin Air (1995–97), have been exhibited at the Whitney Museum in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Museum of Technology in Paris.

His legacy rests above all in having built a bridge between the electronic experimentation of the avant-garde and performance and pedagogical practice, anticipating the use of computing as an instrument of live interaction.