Philippe Boesmans was born in Belgium in 1936. He studied piano at the Royal Conservatoire of Liège, graduating with highest honors (premier prix) but ultimately abandoned his career as a professional pianist – with the exception of a few performances in concert with the Musique Nouvelle Ensemble – preferring to focus on composition, which he studied on his own. His encounters with Pierre Froidebise, Henri Pousseur, Célestin Deliège, and André Souris, as well as courses at Darmstadt, set him on his path and honed his desire to compose.

His first pieces, which date from the 1960s, show the strong influence - filtered through works by Berio, Boulez, Pousseur, and Stockhausen – of a kind of fissured serialism, one that was open to consonance and rythmic cycles.

In 1971, Boesmans joined the Centre de recherches musicales de Wallonie, directed at that time by Henri Pousseur, as well as the Studio électronique de Liège. He worked as a radio producer for RTBF, and from 1985 to 2007 was composer-in-residence of the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, whose directors during that period, Gérard Mortier and then Bernard Foccroulle, commissioned numerous works, including Trakl-Lieder (1987), a transcription of the Monteverdi opera The Coronation of Poppea (1989), as well as several scores for stage pieces: La passion de Gilles (1983) and Reigen (1993), directed by Luc Bondy based on Schnitzler’s eponymous play, which was performed many times and earned the composer a global reputation. Wintermärchen, based on Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, another collaboration with Luc Bondy, premiered in 1999 at the Théâtre Royal de La Monnaie in Brussels and was staged again in 2000 at the Opéra de Lyon and the Thêatre du Châtelet in Paris, and then again at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona in 2004. Other operas followed: Julie, which premiered at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels in 2005, and was staged again in Vienna and at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence; and Yvonne, princesse de Bourgogne, a tragicomedy that premiered at the Opéra de Paris in 2009. Philippe Boesmans collaborated twice with Joël Pommerat, who wrote the libretti and directed two of his operas, Au Monde, which premiered at the Théâtre de La Monnaie in Brussels in 2014, and Pinocchio, which premiered at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence in 2017.

Performances of his compositions feature at major music festivals around the world – Darmstadt, Warsaw, Zagreb, Festival Ars Musica Bruxelles, Royan, Metz, Avignon, Strasbourg, Montreal – and they have received numerous prizes, including the Prix Italia for Upon La-Mi (1969), the Prix de l’Union de la Presse Musicale Belge, the Académie Charles-Cros Prize, the Serge and Olga Koussevitzky International Recording Award for a recording of Concerto pour violon and Conversions, and the Charles-Cros Prize for the DVD of Julie in 2007. In 2000, Boesmans was awarded the Prix Arthur Honegger and the SACD Prix Musique in 2004.