Stefano Gervasoni was born in Bergamo in 1962. He studied piano, and at around age seventeen, having sought advice from Luigi Nono, he enrolled in the Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi di Milan, where he studied composing with Luca Lombardi and then with Niccolo Castiglioni, whose spiritual and poetic perspective he admired, and Azio Corghi, with whom he deepened his skills. Later, he would study occasionally with György Kurtág - in Hungary in 1990, and then at IRCAM in 1992. His encounters with Brian Ferneyhough,Peter Eötvös, and Helmut Lachenmann – with whom he spent a month working in Vienna – were touchstones in his career.

Gervasoni lived in Paris for three years, from 1992 to 1995, and received several commissions, as well as a fellowship from the Villa Medicis in Rome, where he resided from 1995-1996. Before then, he had received various prizes in Italy. He participated in the Forum Junger Komponisten in Cologne, and in the Internationales Komponistenseminar in Vienna (1994), and was invited to give a workshop at Darmstadt in 1998, as well as a masterclass in composition at Royaumont in 2001. In 2005, he received a DAAD fellowship to spend the year in Berlin. The following year, he was appointed professor of composition at the Conservatoire de Paris (CNSMDP).

Since 1992, Stefano Gervasoni has received numerous commissions from ensembles and festivals. In 1997, the series Musique Française d’Aujourd’hui published a retrospective of his work with the Contrechamps ensemble. His music was published early on by Ricordi, but since 2000, Gervasoni has been published by Suvini Zerboni in Milan (several of his pieces may be viewed online on his website). His catalogue includes some sixty pieces, ranging from compositions for solo musicians to orchestral works, as well as numerous vocal pieces. An opera buffa, Limbus-Limbo, premiered at the Musica festival in Strasbourg in 2012.

It is significant that, as a young musician, Gervasoni chose to seek out Nono, given the art music scene in Italy at the time, which featured other major personalities such as Berio, Sciarrino, and Donatoni. He seems to have turned to the author of Prometeo for his sense of creative vexation, one that interrogates the very nature of music beyond overly systematic or excessively mannered languages - although the refined sound of Sciarrino and of works such as Coro by Berio certainly counted for Gervasoni as he was starting out. By the same token, his last encounter with Lachenmann held great importance for him, as if the German composer, a student of Nono’s, might be able pass on to Gervasoni some element of Nono’s thinking, but with a more exacting approach to the craft. His encounter with Grisey was another important one, despite the fact that Gervasoni held himself apart from spectral composing as a school, as he felt no affinity with its systematic nature, as was his encounter with Holliger, with whom he had clear affinities.