Emmanuel Nunes studied theory and counterpoint with Francine Benoît from 1959 to 1963 at the Lisbon Music Academy, and German and Greek philology at the University of the same city.

From 1963 to 1965, he attended the Darmstadt Summer Courses at which Henri Pousseur and Pierre Boulez were teaching. He settled in Paris in 1964. During this time, he regularly attended the analysis and composition classes of Karlheinz Stockhausen, electronic music classes with Jaap Spek, and phonetics classes with Georg Heike, alongside ongoing study with Pousseur, at the Rheinische Musikhochschule in Cologne. Stockhausen’s analysis of his own work, Momente, was to have a major influence on Nunes’ development as a composer, giving him an awareness of the potential role of technology in examining the relationship between perception and musical discourse. In this sense, Nunes’ predilection for open forms and “organic” aspects of music was founded on his desire to explore connections between sound, durations, and musical structure.

In 1971, Nunes graduated with highest honours in music aesthetics with Marcel Beaufils at the Paris Conservatoire (CNSMDP). He subsequently enrolled in a Doctorate in Musicology, focusing on the work of Anton Webern, at the Sorbonne, with support from the Portuguese Ministry of Education (1973-74) and the Gulbenkian Foundation (1976-77). He was a DAAD composer-in-residence in 1978-79, and was awarded a composition grant from the French Ministry of Culture in 1980.

Starting in 1989, Nunes worked regularly at IRCAM, finding there the tools required to realise the complex spatialisations that he wished to apply to his music. Works such as Es webt (1974-75, revised in 1977), Tif’ereth (1978-85), Wandlungen (1986), and Lichtung I (1990-1991) resulted from research undertaken at the institution. Concretely, he explored varied means of diffusing sound, from having musicians encircle the audience and move around the performance space (as in Quodlibet [1990-91]), to computer-aided approaches to spatialised diffusion.

Nunes’ use of technology to formalise his complex musical grammar was nothing short of virtuosic, creating an interactive counterpoint between score and software.

With the exception of a handful of stand-alone works, Nunes grouped his catalogue into two major “cycles,” each of which is unified by its recurrent use of a piece of musical material. The first cycle, comprising numerous works written between 1973 and 1977, is united by the use of a four-note musical anagram. The second cycle, collectively known as La création and made up of works composed between 1977 and 2007 (starting with Nachtmusik and ending with Lichtung III) is unified by its use of what the composer termed “rhythmic pairs,” which were applied to rhythmic phrasing, time signatures, intervals, or spatialisation.

Emmanuel Nunes was also active as a teacher. First teaching at the University of Pau (France) in 1976, he went on to teach at Harvard, the Darmstadt Summer Courses, and ICONS de Novara in Italy. In 1981, he was named Director of Composition Seminars at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, and from 1986 to 1992 taught composition at the Freiburg Musikhochschule. Finally, he taught composition at the Paris Conservatoire (CNSMDP) from 1992 until 2006.

The President of the Portuguese Republic named him a “Comendador da Ordem de Santiago da Espeda” in 1991. He was awarded the UNESCO and Pessoa Prizes, and received a Doctor Honoris Causa from Paris VIII University.

His works were commissioned by the Gulbenkian Foundation, Radio-France and the French Ministry of Culture, among other institutions. His music has been featured at major international new music festivals and widely broadcast on European radio.