He was born in Timi?oara, Romania and emigrated to Israel in 1951.
In Israel, he studied at the Rubin Academy, Tel Aviv.
He subsequently studied at Brandeis University, the Tanglewood Music Center and the University of Illinois, before becoming a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UW-M) (Randel 1996).
He is now an emeritus professor of music at UW-M (Muckian 2017).