Tristan Murail is one of France's most prominent contemporary composers. He is associated with the technique of spectral composition and with the application of computing to music.

Murail was born in Le Havre, France, in 1947. His father was a poet, his mother a journalist, and three of his siblings became writers. Murail attended the Ecole Nationale des Langues Orientales Vivantes, where he received degrees in classical and North African Arabic and in economics. He also took music courses there, and after graduating, he switched to music, entering the Conservatoire de Paris in 1967 and studying composition with Olivier Messiaen. He graduated with a first prize, and in 1971 he won the Prix de Rome, a venerable French composition prize that carries with it a two-year residency at the Villa Medicis in Rome.

In 1973, Murail returned to Paris, and he and a group of other young musicians founded the Ensemble Itinéraire. The group, still in existence, became widely known not only for performances but for research in live electronics and modes of instrumental performance. The ensemble was closely associated with the IRCAM institute headed by Pierre Boulez, and Murail taught there from 1991 to 1997. He became interested in the application of computing techniques to music, and at IRCAM, he was part of the team that developed Patchwork composition software. From 1997 to 2010, Murail was on the composition faculty at Columbia University in New York. He has written large orchestral works -- Gondwana, from 1980, has been widely performed -- as well as three concertos, many chamber and ensemble works (some of them with electronics), and choral music. Many of Murail's instrumental works use the spectral composition technique, in which properties of sound become the basis for harmony and polyphony. Some 50 of Murail's works had been recorded as of the early 2020s, and one recording of his music won the Grand Prix du Disque in 1990. Murail also was awarded the Grand Prix du Président de la République from the Académie Charles Cros in 1992. He spent three years as a guest professor at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg, Austria, and he has given master classes in many countries. As of 2022, Murail was a guest professor at the Shanghai Conservatory in China. ~ James Manheim, Rovi