Emmanuel Nunes

Biography

Nunes was born in Lisbon, where he studied composition, first from 1959 to 1963 at the Academia de Amadores de Música with Francine Benoit, and then with Fernando Lopes-Graça at the University (1962–64). He then attended courses at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse (1963–65), and in 1964 moved to Paris. A year later he moved to Cologne and enrolled at the Hochschule für Musik Köln, and studied composition with Henri Pousseur, electronic music with Jaap Spek, and phonetics with Georg Heike, while also taking courses with Karlheinz Stockhausen at the third and fourth Cologne Courses for New Music in 1965–66 and 1966–67 (Latino 2001; Stockhausen 1971, 200, 204, and photographs 28 and 29, between 200 and 201).

In 1971 he was awarded the Premier Prix d´Esthetique Musicale in the class of Marcel Beaufils at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique in Paris, in 1999 won the UNESCO Composition Prize, and in 2000 was the winner of the Pessoa Prize.

From the 1980s he took on teaching roles, amongst other places at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, Harvard University in the USA, at the Conservatoire de Paris, and at the Darmstadt Summer Courses. From 1986 to 1992 he held a professorship in composition at the New Music Institute of the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg. Nunes was named an Officer of the French Order of Arts and Letters in 1986, and in 1991 was appointed Comendador da Ordem de Santiago da Espada by the President of Portugal. From 1992 until 2006 Nunes was Professor of Composition at the Paris Conservatory.

Nunes died in Paris, two days after his seventy-first birthday (Anon. 2012).

Selected compositions