A unified theory is given of dynamically modified decay and decoherence of field-driven multipartite systems. When this universal framework is applied to two-level systems or qubits experiencing either amplitude or phase noise due to their coupling to a thermal bath, it results in completely analogous formulae for the modified decoherence rates in both cases. The spectral representation of the modified decoherence rates underscores the main insight derived from this approach, namely, that the decoherence rate is the spectral overlap of the noise and modulation spectra. This allows us to come up with general recipes for modulation schemes for the optimal reduction of decoherence under realistic constraints. An extension of the treatment to multilevel and multipartite systems exploits intra-system symmetries to dynamically protect multipartite entangled states. Another corollary of this treatment is that entanglement, which is very susceptible to noise and can die, i.e., vanish at finite times, can be resuscitated by appropriate modulations prescribed by our universal formalism. This dynamical decoherence control is also shown to be advantageous in quantum computation setups, where control fields are applied concurrently with the gate operations to increase the gate fidelity.