Lewin then studied theory and composition with Roger Sessions, Milton Babbitt, Edward T. Cone, and Earl Kim at Princeton University, earning an M.F.A.
Lewin was a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship grantee in 1983–84, served as the president of the Society for Music Theory from 1985 to 1988 and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
He received honorary doctoral degrees from the University of Chicago in 1995, from the New England Conservatory of Music in 2000, and posthumously from Université Marc Bloch de Strasbourg, France, in 2006.
In this work, Lewin applied group theory to music, investigating the basic concepts, interval and transposition, and extending them beyond their traditional application to pitch.
[3] Lewin's writing on the relationship between text and music in song and opera involves composers from Mozart and Wagner, to Schoenberg and Babbitt.
While Lewin is primarily known as a theorist, he was also an active composer who wrote works for a wide range of forces, from solo voice to full orchestra.