Edison Denisov was born on 6 April 1929, in Tomsk, Siberia, and began his university studies in mathematics before devoting himself to music. In 1956, he completed his musical studies at the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied composition with Vissarion Shebalin, orchestration with Nikolay Rakov, analysis with Viktor Tsukkerman, and piano with Vladimir Belov.

In the 1960s, Denisov threw himself into an intensive study of the works of the twentieth century’s classical composers, such as Stravinsky, Bartók, and the Second Viennese School, and Western composers of contemporary art music such as Boulez, Nono, Stockhausen, and Lutoslawski.

During these years he searched for his own personal style, which one can hear beginning to assert itself in his vocal and instrumental pieces of this period. Notable among these are Le Soleil des Incas, the first composition of Denisov’s written fully in his own personal language, which marked a turning point in his career. It premiered in Leningrad in a performance by Guennady Rojdestvensky before being performed across Europe and in North America, including at Darmstadt and in Paris in 1965, when Pierre Boulez included the piece in the program of the Domaine Musical, where it was conducted by Bruno Maderna, and then by Boulez himself in Brussels and Berlin.

During the 1970s, Denisov began writing pieces for larger formations, including most of his concertos, many of which were commissioned by major Western performers including Aurèle Nicolet, Heinz Holliger, Eduard Brunner, and Jean-Marie Londeix. The premiere of his Concerto for violin was given in Milan in a performance by Gidon Kremer. The rigorously woven music that characterized his earlier works gave way to a more supple and freeform use of a wide range of composition techniques and processes, governed by the unifying idea of each composition.

By the 1980s Denisov had reached full maturity as a composer, and his music of this period was composed around different series of characteristic intonations, notably motives using lyrical seconds and thirds, highly vocal in nature. His writing often echoed the polyphonies typical of Russian folk music, with tremendous rhythmic variety that made it highly challenging for performers. The instrinsically theatrical nature of his work involved progressive development of his material and vast moments of culmination.

Denisov wrote most of his major pieces during this period, including L’Écume des jours, based on Boris Vian’s eponymous novel, which premiered in Paris at the Opéra Comique in 1986; the chamber opera Les quatre jeunes filles after a play by Pablo Picasso; the ballet Confession adapted from a short story by Alfred de Musset; and Requiem. He received two other French commissions during this time, one from the Ensemble Intercontemporain for its tenth anniversary, titled Au plus haut des cieux; and one from Daniel Barenboïm, a symphony composed for the twentieth anniversary of the Orchestre de Paris, which premiered at the Salle Pleyel in 1988, and which Baremboïm then conducted in three performances in Chicago in 1991.

Denisov was inspired during this period by the major themes of human existence and religion. He used melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre to express symbolism related to these themes, an approach that continued into the 1990s, when he composed The Story of the Life and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ and Morgentraum. In 1990-1991, Pierre Boulez invited Denisov to come and work at the IRCAM, during which time he composed Sur la nappe d’un étang glacé. Among others, Denisov’s compositions were conducted by Leonard Bernstein, Daniel Barenboïm, Charles Dutoit, Neeme Järvi, Gerd Albrecht, Pierre Boulez, Guennady Rojdestvensky, Wolf-Dieter Hauschild, Vassily Sinaisky, and Bernhard Klee.

Denisov also wrote numerous musical scores for film and stage, and collaborated for nearly thirty years with Youri Liubimov, the director of the Taganka Theater in Moscow, putting on productions in Russia and throughout Europe. Starting in 1959, he taught analysis of musical forms and orchestration at the Moscow Conservatory; in 1992 he began teaching composition, as well. In 1990, he became the director of the Moscow Contemporary Music Association.

Denisov was a correspondent member of the Fine Arts Academies of Bavaria and Berlin, was appointed Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1986 by the French Ministry of Culture, and received the Grand Prix de la Ville de Paris in 1993.

Late in his life Denisov moved to Paris, where he died in 1996 following a long illness.