Peter Lieberson, a searching, inventive American composer whose works were often inspired by his Tibetan Buddhist practice, died Saturday morning in Tel Aviv, where he had gone for medical treatment. He was 64 and lived in Santa Fe, N.M.

The cause was complications of lymphoma, said Kristin Lancino, the vice president of G. Shirmer, his publisher. Lieberson received his diagnosis soon after his second wife, the mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, died of breast cancer in 2006. He composed some of his most acclaimed songs for her.

Lieberson was an eloquent voice in the generation of composers seeking to infuse the thorny rigors of academic music with a more accessible, lyrical sound. Reviewing a 2008 concert of Lieberson’s works in The New York Times, Allan Kozinn praised his “cohesive, energetic and intensely communicative style, with brainy, atonal surfaces that attest to his post-tonal pedigree and a current of lyricism and drama that gives this music its warmth and passion.”

In 1983, Lieberson’s first Piano Concerto brought him to prominence when it was given its first performances by Peter Serkin, one of his longtime champions, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Seiji Ozawa. The Boston Symphony went on to commission his orchestral piece “Drala” (1986); “Red Garuda” (1999), also featuring Serkin; and “Songs of Love and Sorrow” for baritone (2010), part of a flowering of vocal writing in the last decade of his life. His works were performed by all the major American orchestras, and he was also a frequent collaborator with the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the pianist Emanuel Ax.

Peter Lieberson was born Oct. 25, 1946, in New York. He grew up at the center of the city’s cultural life, the son of Goddard Lieberson, the longtime head of Columbia Records, and Vera Zorina, an actress, ballerina and a former wife of George Balanchine.

Explored music early

As a child, Lieberson taught himself harmony by figuring out the voicings on recordings by the jazz pianist Bill Evans. He loved to attend the Broadway shows his father was recording, then go home and refit the tunes with chromatic jazz chords.

During those early years, Lieberson was also exposed to the works of Webern, Schoenberg and Stravinsky, which his father was recording complete. From his composition teachers at Columbia University, he absorbed the 12-tone technique but used it, he once explained, as “a generalized means of expression rather than a way to compose.”

While at Columbia, he began to practice Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism, and in 1976, he moved to Boulder, Colo., to continue his studies with the Buddhist master Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. There, Lieberson met and married Ellen Kearney, another of Trungpa Rinpoche’s students; together, they moved to Boston to direct Shambhala Training, a meditation and cultural program. Lieberson received a Ph.D. from Brandeis University and taught composition at Harvard University from 1984 to 1988.

Moved to Nova Scotia

Lieberson served for several years as international director of Shambhala Training in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he and his family moved in 1988. After 1994, Lieberson devoted all his time to composition, but his Buddhist practice remained a central theme in his work. His first opera, “Ashoka’s Dream,” was based on the life of an emperor of India in the third century B.C. who renounced violence after converting to Buddhism.

“As in his instrumental works, his language here is thickly chromatic with whiffs of serial techniques,” Anthony Tommasini wrote in The Times of the 1997 premiere at the Santa Fe Opera. “Yet the music is harmonically grounded and lucid. A sinewy lyrical thread runs through the score, and the level of inventiveness is continually striking.”