Described as "the best-known and most performed Italian composer" of the present day,[1] his works include Quaderno di strada (2003) and La porta della legge (2006–08).

After his classical studies and a few years of university in his home city, in 1969 he moved to Rome, where he attended Franco Evangelisti's course in electronic music at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia.

Apart from being the author of most of the librettos of his operas, Sciarrino has written many articles, essays and texts, some of which have been chosen and collected in Carte da suono, CIDIM – Novecento, 2001.

Pietro Misuraca, in one of the most recent books on the composer's music (2018), wrote: A stranger (also for reasons of age) to the pointillist-structuralist phase of the New Music, Sciarrino, along with Iannis Xenakis and György Ligeti, was among the voices most lucidly critical of Darmstadt's orthodoxy, its contradictions and its limits, animated by that concrete desire for "sound" that some other composers were developing in those years.

His discography is wide-ranging, including more than eighty titles, published by international labels such as Stradivarius, Neos, Arion, and Kairos and repeatedly mentioned and rewarded.