He is currently a professor at the Latvian Academy of Music.
He studied under Aram Khachaturian at the Moscow Conservatory,[2] and has worked in a creative capacity at Oxford University and Cambridge University.
His style has been described as "new consonant music", with an "amazingly clear positive spirit".
He has written theses focusing on the work of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and Johannes Ockeghem.
[2] Pelēcis teaches the history of theory and counterpoint at the Latvian Academy of Music, and was the first president of the Riga Center for Early Music.