She was born as Sofia (Sonia) Fri[e]dman-Kochevskaya in Moscow, where her mother worked as a governess in the Tolstoy household.

She studied at the Conservatoire de Paris from 1908 to 1913, where her teachers included Alfred Brun and Guillaume Rémy for violin, S. Chenée for piano, and Vincent d'Indy and Camille Chevillard for composition.

She moved to Berlin in 1914, where she studied violin with Bronisław Huberman; by 1919 she had undertaken several concert tours of Western Europe, on which she performed her own works.

[4] Following her husband's death in 1929, she toured the US, performing to critical acclaim her first piano and violin concertos in an American debut with Leopold Stokowski in Philadelphia and Frederick Stock in Chicago.

In 1970 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Brandon University, Manitoba, as well as the title 'professor' by the Viennese minister of education.

In 1950, with the Piano Sonata no.5, she began to adopt serialism, and by 1955 her use of metric manipulation showed similarities to that of Olivier Messiaen and Boris Blacher.

She retained a lifelong admiration for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach – the ending of her 1955 Concerto for Orchestra reworks the prelude from his Partita in E major – and, like Bela Bartók, she frequently used the interval of a fourth as a structural device.