Since the age of 19, Philippe Manoury has been playing at festivals and concerts of contemporary music (in Royan, La Rochelle, Donaueschingen, London…), but he truly owes his fame to his Cryptophonos creation, by pianist Claude Helffer at the Metz festival.
In 1978, he settled in Brazil to give lessons and conferences about contemporary music in various universities (Sao Paulo, Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador).
In 1981, back in France, he became researcher at the IRCAM. With mathematician Miller Puckette, he studied the real-time interaction between acoustic instruments and new technologies linked to musical data processing. This work led to an interactive cycle of pieces for various instruments: Sonvs ex machina, comprised of Jupiter, Pluton, La Partition du Ciel et de l’Enfer, and Neptune.
From 1983 to 1987 Philippe Manoury was responsible for the teaching program with the Ensemble InterContemporain. He then taught composition and electronic music at the Lyon Conservatory from 1987 to 1997. From 1995 to 2001 he was composer in residence at the Orchestre de Paris. From 1998 to 2000 he was in charge of the European Summer Academy held by the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence. Since 1994, he has conducted several composition seminars, in France and other countries (U.S.A., Japan, Finland, Sweden, Czech Republic, Canada).
Between 2001 and 2003 he has been in residence at the Scène nationale d’Orléans. His works have been played in major cities around the world: Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Berlin, Oslo, Amsterdam, Vienna, Bratislava, Helsinki and Tokyo. Pierre Boulez has conducted his orchestral works at Carnegie Hall in New York as well as Sound and Fury (dedicated to him) with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Cleveland Orchestra. Philippe Manoury has composed three operas: 60e Parallèle was premiered in 1998 at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris; K…, based on The Process, by Kafka, was created in 2001 by the Opéra de Paris-Bastille and La Frontière in Orléans (France) during his residence there.
In 1988 he was awarded the Composition Prize of the City of Paris. The SACEM has awarded him its Chamber Music prize (1976), the prize for the best musical realization for Jupiter (1988), and the prize of Symphonic Music in 1999.
For Pierre Boulez’s 80th birthday, in early 2005, Philippe Manoury wrote Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man for instrumental ensemble. In April of that same year, the Ensemble Intercontemporain commissioned and premiered Identités remarquables. Since late 2004, Philippe Manoury has been living the United States where he teaches at the University of California in San Diego.
