Julio Estrada Velasco was born on 10 April 1943 in Mexico City. His parents, Manuel Estrada (1902-1980) and Concepción Velasco (1920-2009), were political exiles who had fled the Spanish Civil war and settled in Mexico. After a year studying at the School of Music of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Estrada began studying composition with Julián Orbón (1925-1991) at Mexico’s Conservatorio Nacional de Música.

In 1960, Estrada met pianist and musicologist Velia Nieto (1943-2008). The two married, and she would become a central figure in his life and creative work.

Between 1965 and 1969 Estrada lived in Paris, studying at first as an auditor and then as a regular student (from 1967-68) in Olivier Messiaen‘s class at the Conservatoire de Paris. He also took private lessons with Nadia Boulanger. Seeking greater creative freedom, between 1968 and 1969 Estrada attended lectures by Xenakis at the Schola Cantorum and then went to Cologne to study composition with Karlheinz Stockhausen. In 1969, Estrada founded the Néo-Néo improvisation group with Daniel Raguin and Bernard Leblanc and began exploring musical research as a way to inject greater freedom into his approach to music.

Returning to Mexico in 1969, Estrada and a group of student’s from the UNAM’s School of Music founded a Mexican branch of the Néo-néo Ensemble as well as another ensemble called Pro Música Nueva. He composed scores for Federico Weingartshover’s films Tal vez siempre sí me muera (1970) and Caminando pasos, caminando (1977), as well as for Hugo Hiriart’s film El Ángel de Cuerno. In 1974, Estrada was appointed as a researcher at the UNAM’s Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas (Institute for Aesthetic Research), where he chaired a research project on the history of Mexican music from the precolumbian period to the present, and directed Música, Sistema Interactivo de Investigación y Composición (a research program on music, mathematics, and computers)

The death of Estrada’s father in 1980 sparked a deep transformation in his creative life and his approach to music. An aesthetic dichotomy emerged as he began to profoundly question European cultural values and at the same time to reach back to Mexico’s earliest musical roots in pre-Columbian culture. He began work editing La música de México (a ten-volume series published by the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas). At the same time, he formulated his General Theory of Intervallic Classes (applicable to macro and microintervallic scales of duration, pitch, and timbre), and collaborated with Max Díaz and Víctor Adán to develop MUSIIC, a computer music program that generates combinations of scales of duration, pitch, and timbre. In 1985, Estrada moved to Temixco, in southern Mexico, where he composed ishini’ioni (1984-1990), which received a special mention from the jury of the Prince Pierre de Monaco Composition Prize (1992).

Estrada headed the UNAM’s Laboratoire de Création Musicale, where he teaches the theory and philosophy of musical creation; in 1989, he was appointed as the director of the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas and the Institute of Applied Mathematics and Systems (UNAM). He launched two projects, one on scales titled “matla’tlapoa” (which comes from the Nahuatl words matla, “crystal” and tlapoa, calculation or counting), and one titled “eua’oolin” (from the Greek eolo, or “wind,” and the Nahuatl oolin, or “movement”) designed to generate tridimensional trajectories representing 3 different components of sound.

In 1994, Estrada obtained a doctorate from the University of Strasbourg, presenting a dissertation titled Théorie de la Composition : discontinuum-continuum (1994: “Theory of Composition: Discontinuum-Continuum”). In 2000, he succeeded Iannis Xenakis as director of the Centre d’Études de Mathématiques et Automatique Musicales (CEMAMu), where he helped in the creation of a Windows version of the UPIC in three dimensions, inspired by the “eua’oolin” project.

In 1992, his multi-opera Murmullos del páramo was unanimously named the winner of the Madrid and Radio2 CDMC Competition in Spain. In 2008, he began work on an opera-novel that requires the reader to become the musical performer of certain passages that describe works, memories, or musical imaginings.

Estrada has been a guest professor and researcher at the Universities of Stanford, San Diego, New Mexico, Rostock, and the Sorbonne, and is regularly invited to teach in Europe, Latin America, and Asia.