Gérard Pesson was born in 1958 in Torteron, in the Cher department of France. After studying at the Sorbonne and then at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris, he founded the journal Entretemps in 1986. He was a resident at the Villa Medici from 1990 to 1992. In May 1996, he received the Prince Pierre of Monaco Foundation Prize, followed by the Music Prize of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in March 2007, and the SACD Music Prize in 2017. In 2019, he was awarded the Arthur Honegger Prize, and the Académie Charles Cros presented him with the Grand Prix du Président de la République for his entire body of work.

In its 2008 edition, the Festival d’Automne à Paris devoted a portrait to him comprising 19 works, including Rubato ma glissando with the artist Annette Messager. The 2016 edition of the Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik also devoted a portrait to him, in three concerts including two world premieres.

The City of Paris commissioned him to create a cycle of “104 musical actions” for the inauguration of the Centquatre, works premiered by various ensembles and musicians between October 2008 and June 2011.

His opera Pastorale, after L’Astrée by Honoré d’Urfé, commissioned by the Staatstheater Stuttgart, was premiered in concert version in May 2006, then staged by video artist Pierrick Sorin at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris in June 2009.

His third opera, Trois contes, with a libretto and staging by David Lescot, was premiered in March 2019 at the Opéra de Lille, which had commissioned the work; it went on to receive the Critics’ Prize.

After Trois cantates, for voice, ensemble, and electronics, on poems by Mathieu Nuss, Elena Andreyev, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ircam commissioned him to write a “music fiction”, Un pas de chat sauvage, based on a text by Marie NDiaye, for the 2021 Manifeste Festival; the work was revived in 2022.

He is composer-in-residence at the Haute École de Musique de Lausanne for the 2025–2026 season. His discography includes nine monographic recordings released between 1996 and 2021. The most recent include three monographic discs by Ensemble Cairn and L’Instant Donné, released in 2018, as well as, in January 2020 on the Erato label, his concerto Future is a faded song, written at the initiative of pianist Alexandre Tharaud, who premiered it in 2012. The complete recording of his string quartets by the Diotima Quartet was released by Naïve in 2022.

In 2004, Éditions Van Dieren published excerpts from his journal under the title Cran d’arrêt du beau temps. A new volume is in preparation.

Gérard Pesson was professor of composition at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris from 2006 to 2025. His music is published by Henry Lemoine and Maison Ona.