Georges Aperghis was born in 1945 in Athens, Greece. Both of his parents were artists - his father a sculptor and his mother a painter - and Aperghis hesitated for a long time between the visual arts and composition. Essentially self-taught, Aperghis discovered music by listening to the radio and through piano lessons with a family friend.

Upon moving Paris in 1963, Aperghis discovered serialism through the Domaine Musical, along with the musique concrète of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, and the research of Iannis Xenakis, whose work inspired Aperghis’ own early work. By 1970, however, the composer had begun working in his own, much freer language.

La Tragique Histoire du nécromancien Hiéronimo et de son miroir, his first musical theater composition, was written in 1971. The tight link between music, text, and stage that featured in this work is one he has continued exploring in his pursuit of original forms of musical narrative. In 1976, Aperghis founded ATEM (Atelier théâtre et musique), a musical theater company housed first in Bagnolet and then at the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre (from 1992 to 1997). He returned to composing, which, as he puts it, must “make music of everything,” while continuing to invent new approaches to his work, which includes musicians and singers alongside actors and visual artists. His works mix vocals, instrumentals, movement, narrative, and scenography in a uniquely expressive environment. His Récitations (1978) for solo soprano explores every human emotion and expression. Musical development and the emergence of a signifying language, captured as they emerge and moving forward as one through the repetition of snippets of text and sound and arranged as a game of construction, play with expectations and with the senses. Many of his musical theater pieces follow this path, including the opera Je vous dis que je suis mort (1978), the sextet L’Origine des espèces (1992), and Machinations (2000).

For Aperghis, opera is the culmination and the coming-together of his experimental work, in which the text is the unifying and determining element and voice the main vector of expression. He has composed a total of eight lyric works, including Avis de Tempête (2004), which premiered at the Opéra de Lille and received the Grand Prix de la Critique in 2005.

He has also composed numerous instrumental, chamber, vocal, and orchestral pieces. Even his instrumental music incorporates theatrical and verbal elements, a feature echoed in some titles, such as Quatre Récitations for cello (1980).

His catalogue includes over a hundred works. He premiered two pieces in 2000, which were heard across Europe: Die Hamletmaschine-Oratorio, based on a text by Heiner Müller, and Machinations, a musical performance commissioned by the IRCAM, for which the SACEM awarded him the prize of “Best Premiere of the Year.”

In 2004, in addition to the opera Avis de Tempête, he composed Dark side, based on Aeschylus’ Oresteia. His Wölfli Kantata premiered in the summer of 2006, based on texts by Adolf Wölfi, as well as Contretemps. Le petit poucet, based on the Charles Perrault tale and composed in collaboration with videographer and sculptor Hans Op de Beeck premiered in December 2007. In May 2010, the Opéra comique de Paris premiered Les Boulingrin, an opéra-bouffe directed by Jérôme Deschamps, based on a libretto by Georges Courteline. June 2011 saw the premiere of Luna Park, commissioned by the IRCAM/Pompidou Center and the Warsaw Autumn Festival, based on a text by François Regnault, a drama that portrayed the conflict betwen two worlds, one real and the other virtual. In 2012 and 2014, he wrote a series of Six Études for large orchestra (commissioned by the Westdeutscher Rundfunk and the Musica Festival Strasbourg), and in 2016, his Concerto pour accordéon premiered at Musica Viva, performed by the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, conducted by Emilio Pomarico.

Georges Aperghis was awarded the Mauricio Kagel Music Prize 2011, a Venice Biennale Golden Lion in 2015, and the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Contemporary Music in 2016.

In 2018, he was a featured guest at the IRCAM ManiFeste festival for the premiere of his work Thinking Things and for the French premiere of Obstinate, for solo double base.