Toch was born on Dec. 7, 1887 in Vienna; taught himself piano in his grandmother's pawnshop; learned musical notation from a local violinist, and copied Mozart's string quartets for practice; began to compose chamber music, and at age 17 had a quartet performed; in 1909 he won the prestigious Mozart Prize and a scholarship to study at the Frankfurt Conservatory, where he studied piano with Willy Rehberg and composition with Iwan Knorr; won the Mendelssohn Prize in 1910 and the Austrian State Prize four times in succession; in 1913 he was appointed teacher of composition at the Mannheim Musikhochschule; married Lilly Zwack in 1916; earned Dr. phil. degree in 1921; taught piano and composition in Berlin from 1929-33, leaving at the onset of the Nazi regime for Paris, London, and finally the US, where he taught at the New School for Social Research in New York (1934-36); taught at the Univ. of Southern CA (1937-48), afterward giving private instruction; lived in Vienna and Switzerland from 1950-58, then spent the remainder of his life in LA; won the Pulitzer and Huntington-Hartford Prizes for his Third Symphony (1956), was elected to the American National Institute of Arts and Letters (1956), received honorary citations from the German and Austrian governments, and won a Grammy Award (1960); publications include Melodielehre (1923) and The shaping forces in music (1948); his compositions encompass all genres and include Fuge aus der Geographie (1930), Seven symphonies, 13 string quartets, several chamber operas, and music for films; he died on Oct. 1, 1964 in LA.
 

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