Peteris Vasks was born in Aizpute (Latvia) in 1946. He attended the Riga Music Academy and the Lithuanian Music Academy in Vilnius where he studied double-bass with Vitautas Sereika. He studied composition with Valentin Utkin at the Latvian Academy of Music in Riga and was a member of various symphony and chamber orchestras including the Lithuanian Philharmonic Orchestra, the Latvian Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra and the orchestra of the Latvian Radio and Television. Vasks has often included archaic folkloric elements of Latvian music in his compositions and many of his works have programmatic titles which refer to natural occurrences. But what really matters to Vasks is not a poetic praise of nature or a description of landscapes as aesthetic ideal; rather it is the mutual relation between nature and man, the beauty of life and the threatening ecological and moral destruction of these values. These are the subjects that the composer has taken up primarily in his latest works and set to music. In 1996 Vasks was appointed "Main Composer" of the Stockholm Festival of New Music. He was a three-time winner of the Latvian Music Prize: in 1993 for Litene, in 1998 for his violin concerto Distant Light, and in 2000 for his Second Symphony. The Ondine release of the Second Symphony was awarded the Cannes Classic Award in 2004. In 1996, Vasks was awarded the Herder Prize of the Alfred Toepfer Foundation Hamburg and since 1994 he has been an honorary member of the Latvian Academy of Sciences. In 2001 he was offered membership in the Royal Swedish Academy of Music founded by King Gustav III in Stockholm in 1771. In 2006 he was composer in residence at the Presteigne and the Vale of Glamorgan festivals.

Peteris Vasks lives as a freelance composer in Riga.